ON1 has long been known for its high-quality plug-ins for Photoshop effects and resizing, but the company also produces a standalone photo editing application, Photo RAW 2019.
This handy software combines some of the nondestructive workflow aspects of Adobe Lightroom with the layers, masking, and retouching capabilities of Photoshop.
The software has some admirable characteristics, though it still trails its more mature competition from Adobe and CyberLink.
Pricing and Getting Started
You get ON1 Photo RAW 2019 for a one-time payment of $99.99 (or $79.99 for upgraders); there's no subscription like the $9.99 per month required if you want to use Adobe Lightroom.
ON1's price is reasonable compared with that of Capture One ($299), DxO Optics Pro ($149), and CyberLink PhotoDirector ($99.99).
You can try out the software for 30 days for the price of entering your email address.
It's a reasonable 1GB download; that's larger than Corel AfterShot Pro (142MB), Capture One (652MB), and CyberLink PhotoDirector (370MB), but smaller than Lightroom's 1.3GB.
The software runs on Windows 7 through 10 and macOS 10.12 and later.
The installer wasn't aware of my 4K screen resolution, so it displayed tiny text.
During installation, the setup program adds plugins to your existing Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or Lightroom Classic installations.
When you first run the program, you have the option of joining the company's product improvement program, which doesn't harvest personal data, according to the dialog.
After you're all set up and first enter the program's actual interface, you see a Getting Started dialog that helpfully takes you through using the program via links to online videos.
For some reason, the program opened these up in Internet Explorer, even though Edge is my default browser.
The Getting Set Up video said that the program starts in your Pictures folder, but on my system, it started in the drive's root folder.
Interface
ON1 Photo RAW's interface packs a lot of tools, and is not the most straightforward of its peers to navigate.
I only discovered where some features were days after starting to use it.
The program has just two mode buttons: Browse and Edit, with sub-choices under the latter for Develop, Effects, Portrait, and Local.
Switching modes is somewhat inconveniently done with buttons all the way at the top right, and sometimes it's slower than I'd like.
As with many photo apps, the left panel shows the sources of your photos, such as drives, folders, and cloud services.
It also shows which folders are cataloged (or already imported into ON1), and Albums you've amassed.
The right panel is similar to that in Lightroom, showing either photo info and metadata or editing controls, depending on whether you're in Browse or Edit mode.
You can collapse either side panel with controls at the bottom of the window.
The center area can switch between Gallery, Filmstrip, and Full Image, and Compare views.
You can zoom by clicking on the photo, but there's no mouse-wheel zooming, nor is there a button to take you instantly to 1:1 pixel viewing.
A Preview button lets you compare the edited version with the original, which is useful, as is the multiple-image view, which nicely lets you match zoom and detail areas between the photos.
One missing interface nicety: I wish double-clicking reset adjustment sliders as it does in Lightroom and CyberLink PhotoDirector.
Import and Organize
There's no clear Import button like the ones you find in Lightroom and PhotoDirector, but you can import from a memory card, connected camera, or external USB drive using the File > Import option.
Plugging a card into the computer doesn't pop up an Import dialog as it does in Lightroom; rather, it simply adds a drive entry in the Local Drives list.
Unlike AfterShot Pro, ON1 actually moves the image files to a folder you specify.
It also lets you choose file naming, add metadata (including keywords), and apply presets.
If your photo files are already on the computer or you intend to dump them into the same folders regularly, you can designate them as Catalogued Folders.
Photo files in these folders are automatically added to your ON1 catalog, making them searchable and adding them to automatic albums like Captured Recently.
You can right-click on a folder in the left panel to easily add it to your Catalogued folders.
Unfortunately, media cards aren't extended the same right-click courtesy for importing.
If you're moving from Lightroom, ON1 has a tool that lets you import your catalog including almost all of the nondestructive edits you've made.
Automatic albums let you group together images that meet certain criteria, such as date range, aperture, camera, lens, focal length, ISO, and more.
I really like this capability.
I would, however, like to see a Last Import choice in the Albums section.
You can further organize photos with like, dislike, color coding, and star ratings.
The Filters section in the left-panel in Browse view lets you limit the view by likes and dislikes, color codes, star ratings, camera, and even lens—the last of which Lightroom CC can't manage.
You can't search by object types as you can in Photoshop Elements, where you can type "tree" and see all your photos containing those objects.
Nor does it have face tagging or geotagging organization capabilities.
I'm impressed with the quality of ON1's initial raw conversion results.
My converted test images were less saturated and slightly more detailed than Lightroom's rendering with the default Adobe Color raw conversion profile.
Like Lightroom's recent multiple raw Profiles, ON1 gives you a choice of raw rendering profiles as well, including ON1 Portrait, Standard, Landscape, Vivid, and Neutral, as well as camera-matching versions for all of those but Vivid.
ON1 Standard looks best to me in most cases, just as Adobe Color is usually best in Lightroom.
In some cases, though, switching to another rendering profile can improve your shot without tweaking any adjustment sliders.
Left: ON1 Photo RAW, Right: Adobe Lightroom, both using the programs' Landscape profile.
Tethered shooting lets pros get photos into the software as soon as they're shot, and ON1 supports this.
It even lets you apply an adjustment preset, add metadata, use custom naming, and simultaneously save a backup.
Tethering in ON1 is supported for over 70 Canon and Nikon DSLR models.
Adjusting and Editing Photos
ON1 includes all the standard lighting tools: Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Midtones, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks.
Midtones actually doesn't appear in every app, so ON1 gets extra points for that.
A Structure tool adjusts microcontrast, which can add clarity.
You can copy settings and apply them to another similar photo, or save your adjustments as a preset.
If you don't want to make your own presets, there's a generous selection on the left panel in Edit mode.
There are a lot of excellent preset choices here—way beyond what's offered by Instagram—in categories such as Architecture, Black & White, Color Film, Hipster, Urban, and Weddings.
Some filters are more correction-oriented, such as the Color Grading, Haze Reducing, and People sets.
They're a lot of fun to play with and can give your images different looks and emphasize different subjects.
If those aren't enough, the program supports CLUTs, which offer a world of color styles.
The Haze tool does a good job of clarifying photos, but like Lightroom's it can add a blue color cast to outdoor scenes.
The best haze remover I've seen is the one in the ClearView tool in DxO PhotoLab.
The Curves tool lets you use up to 11 control points, and there are presets with useful options like Contrast Boost and Lighten Mids.
Like all the better pro photo apps these days, ON1 includes lens profile-based corrections.
The database of lenses is impressive, at over 870.
That's far more than CyberLink offers for PhotoDirector, while Adobe's database includes well over 1,000 lenses.
The ON1 profile indeed improved barrel and pincushion geometric distortion as well as vignetting.
Manual geometry corrections let you alter Keystone, Level, and Position.
The program does have noise reduction sliders for luminance and color, but it's not as effective as Lightroom's, and far less effective than DxO PhotoLab's.
ON1 does a decent job of removing chromatic aberration, and you can manually adjust removal of green and purple fringing.
But DxO and Lightroom at this point do a near-perfect job of chromatic aberration removal.
One final correction I appreciate—as someone who has owned a camera with one pixel that always showed up red at full zoom—is the Remove Hot Pixels option, which is on by default.
The Faces tools let you whiten teeth and eyes, remove skin blemishes, reduce shine, and more.
The eye tool lets you whiten the eye whites as well as sharpen the irises.
That and the skin softening make ON1 Photo RAW an effective tool for portraits.
Layers and More
Like Photoshop, ON1 includes layer editing.
This is useful for effects like double exposures or other ways of combining images or creating masks.
You can also use layers to store common photo adjustments and edits separately.
You can combine those last two options to, for example, apply adjustments just to certain parts of an image.
They're also good for adding captions, shapes, and drawings to a photo.
The program has a handy Align Layers feature, which is good for group portraits and, say, adding a better-looking sky from another photo.
ON1's layers can use many of the same blending modes that Photoshop offers, including Darken, Difference, Hue, Hard Light, and so on.
But ON1 saves layered image files in its own ONPhoto file format, but the program can read some PSD files.
You can turn off the Layer panel section if you'd rather not bother with them.
Working with layers in ON1 is even slower than normal editing, especially when it comes to saving.
A few more nifty features in the software include panorama stitching, HDR blending, and focus stacking.
The last one lets you combine shots of the same scene to get all parts of the photo in focus.
Another special capability of the software is its resizing that uses fractal technology to produce excellent results.
Performance
During testing, I noticed that navigating around and switching between photos produced more of a delay compared with Lightroom or PhotoDirector.
The same was true for switching between Edit and Browse modes, which often took several seconds.
On my timed import testing, ON1 performed respectably.
I tested it by importing 157 24MP raw files in CR2 format from a Canon EOS 6D.
Each file weighed in at about 25-30MB.
I tested on an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10 Home and sporting a 4K display, 16GB RAM, a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700T CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M discrete graphics card.
I imported from a Class 4 SD card to a fast SSD on the PC.
ON1 took 1:49 (minutes:seconds) for the import to complete, compared with 2:35 for Lightroom, 2:41 for Capture One, and a group-leading 1:03 for PhotoDirector.
AfterShot Pro took 1:04, but that was just for adding photos to its database and creating previews, without actually moving the image file data.
Sharing and Output
The Windows version of ON1 doesn't offer any direct uploading to services such as SmugMug or Flickr, as Lightroom does.
The Mac version can directly share to social media, because it uses macOS's built-in sharing feature.
If only the Windows program were a Universal store app, it could get simple sharing to lots of outputs thanks to Windows's built-in sharing.
For printing, ON1 lets you specify a printer color profile, and even upload your own.
You can only print one image at a time—no contact sheets, which seems odd, but it's better than Lightroom CC, which doesn't print at all.
ON1 does support Watermarking, but you need to have an image with your logo; you can't enter custom text, as you can in AfterShot Pro.
Help is online or as a complete, downloadable PDF guide—better than Adobe's hit-or-miss web-only help.
Is ON1 the One?
This relative newcomer in the photo workflow space is packed with powerful correction, editing, and enhancement tools, combining some of the features of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.
Its interface is a bit dense and less intuitive than its Adobe competition, however, and workflow features like organization and output options fall a bit short as well.
It does save you the monthly tribute you pay to use Adobe's software, with its one-time pricing.
Nevertheless, for its superior interface and fuller toolset, Lightroom remains our workflow Editors' Choice, and Photoshop earns that honor for full photo-editing power.
