ON1 is known for high-quality plug-ins for effects, noise reduction, and digital enlarging, but the company also produces a standalone photo editing application, ON1 Photo RAW. Unsurprisingly, this handy software also works as a plug-in, combining 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’s not as slick and user-friendly as its more mature competition from Adobe and CyberLink.
How Much Does ON1 Photo RAW Cost?
You get ON1 Photo Raw 2021 for a one-time payment of $99.99 (or $79.99 for users upgrading from a previous version), and subscription options start at $7.99 per month (or $89.99 per year) and get you continuous updates, mobile apps, 200GB cloud syncing storage, and ON1’s NoNoise AI plug-in. For comparison, Adobe Lightroom requires a $9.99 per month subscription, which gets you 1TB of cloud storage. ON1’s price is reasonable compared with that of Capture One ($299), DxO Optics Pro ($149), and CyberLink PhotoDirector ($99.99)—all one-time prices. You can try out the software for 30 days simply by signing up with your email address—ON1 doesn’t require a credit card for the trial.
The software runs on Windows 7 through 10 (64-bit only) and macOS 10.13 and later. During installation, the setup program adds plug-ins to any existing Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or Lightroom Classic installations. The software takes up over 2GB on the hard drive; that’s larger than Corel AfterShot Pro (142MB), Capture One (652MB), CyberLink PhotoDirector (370MB), and Lightroom (1.3GB). You can also use ON1 as a plug-in for Affinity Photo, Apple Photos, Corel PaintShop Pro, and Adobe Photoshop Elements. 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 relevant dialog box.
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. You can open this module at any time by tapping the + icon in the left toolbar.
ON1 Photo RAW’s Interface
The program’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 I started using it. The program has just two mode buttons: Browse and Edit, with sub-choices under the latter for Develop, Effects, Portrait AI, and Local. Switching modes is somewhat inconveniently done with buttons all the way at the top-right section of the interface (most photo apps put these top-center), and sometimes the process is slower than I’d like.
As with many photo apps, the left-hand 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-hand panel is like that in Lightroom; it shows 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.
Depending on your preference, the center area can show Gallery, Filmstrip, and Full Image, and Compare views. You can zoom by clicking on the photo, but there’s no mouse-wheel zooming support 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 conveniently lets you match zoom and detail areas between the photos.
Double-clicking on adjustment sliders now resets them to default values as it does in Lightroom and CyberLink PhotoDirector and I like how the exposure adjustment uses the same stop increments as your camera does. I should note that the program didn’t scale for my QHD screen resolution, and as a result, the interface text looked small; it will be tiny on 4K screens.
Import and Organize
ON1 doesn’t include a 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 from Device option. Plugging a card into the computer doesn’t pop up an Import dialog as it does in Lightroom either; rather, it simply adds a drive entry in the Local Drives list. ON1 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 Cataloged Folders. Photo files in these folders are automatically added to your ON1 catalog. This makes them searchable.
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 all the nondestructive edits you’ve made; understandably, it doesn’t transfer Lightroom Smart Collections.
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 Latest Import choice in the Albums section. You can further organize photos with likes, dislikes, color coding, and star ratings. You can add keywords in the Metadata panel, but you don’t get a set of standard keywords as you do in Lightroom and some other apps. ON1’s organization tools don’t include face-recognition capabilities, meaning you can’t organize photos by people automatically. Many apps, including CyberLink PhotoDirector, now offer this feature.
A relatively new Smart Organize mode, accessible from the lightbulb icon in the left toolbar, roots out duplicates and identifies those photos taken at the same time or in the same place. It’s basically a search result panel that lets you reject, delete, or move photos that are merely clutter.
There is a Map view, which shows your image’s location on a map based on GPS data along with a filmstrip view of the images in the current folder. It’s not as capable as other apps’ map views, which show image thumbnails right on the map, and it only shows one photo’s location on the map at a time.
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. You can’t search by object types as you can in it’s, where you can type “tree” and see all your photos containing those objects.
ON1 supports raw files from most recent cameras, and since our last review it has added support for the Nikon Z 6 II, Nikon Z 7 II, Leica SL2-S, Fujifilm GFX-100S, and Sony Alpha 1, among others. The quality of its initial raw conversion results is good, but my converted test images were more detailed in Lightroom’s rendering with the default Adobe Portrait raw conversion profile and lens profile correction applied. ON1 automatically applies lens correction at import.
Like Lightroom’s recent multiple raw Profiles, ON1 gives you a choice of raw rendering profiles as well, including ON1 Portrait, ON1 Standard, ON1 Landscape, ON1 Vivid, and ON1 Neutral, as well as camera-matching versions for all of those except 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 requiring you to tweak any adjustment sliders.
Left: ON1 Photo Raw, Right: Adobe Lightroom, both using the programs’ default import settings.
Tethered shooting lets pros get photos into the software as soon as they’re shot with a camera connected via USB, and ON1 supports this feature. It even lets you apply an adjustment preset, add metadata, use custom naming, and simultaneously save a backup. ON1 supports tethering for Canon and Nikon high-end cameras; for tethered shooting with Sony Alpha series cameras, you need Capture One.
Adjusting and Editing Photos
ON1 includes all the standard lighting tools: Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Midtones, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks. Midtones 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.
Since my last evaluation of ON1 Photo Raw, the app has gained AI Auto and AI Match in the Tone control section on the editing panel. The AI Auto setting works quite well, and I appreciate that a slider lets you decrease and increase its strength. The AI Match option is to get your photo looking the way it did on the back of your camera to reproduce any adjustments set on-camera.
Also new is Portrait AI, which is intended as an automatic retouching tool. It finds any faces in an image and applies smoothing and other corrections. Each face gets its own button with slider adjustments for not only smoothing and blemishes, but also for more AI-type options such as left and right eye size and brightness, teeth whitening, and lip vibrance (which makes it look like your subject is wearing lipstick). The tools are similar to Adobe Photoshop’s recent Neural filters. Those go a bit further and even let you change the expression from one of anger to happiness and change the apparent age of your subject. Note that these Adobe tools are still marked as beta, though they worked fine in my testing.
If you don’t want to make your own custom presets, there’s a generous selection on the left panel in Edit mode. There are indeed 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 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 950. That’s many more than CyberLink offers for PhotoDirector, while Adobe’s database includes well over 1,700 lenses. DxO PhotoLab has over 64,000 because it makes profiles based on both the camera body and the lens. The ON1 profile indeed improved barrel and pincushion geometric distortion as well as vignetting. Manual geometry corrections let you alter Keystone, Level, and Position options.
The program does have noise reduction sliders for luminance and color, but they’re not as effective as Lightroom’s, and far less effective than DxO PhotoLab’s or the result you get from DxO PureRAW. ON1 offers a separate NoNoise AI application which I have yet to test.
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.
The program includes local adjustment tools as well. An updated spot healing tool automatically selects a source area to smooth out blemishes, but you can change the source area if it doesn’t fit your needs. You can use the tool to remove unwanted objects from shots, but it’s not as smart or automatic as Adobe’s content-aware tools.
The Local brush not only lets you paint on settings like Exposure, Contrast, and Vibrance, but also gives you control over Brushstrokes and Shapes. The Perfect Brush option does a good job of selection around complex objects like trees or hair. You can add custom brushes from TIF files as well.
The new Color Replace effect works well, either with several presets or an eyedropper to choose the original and new color.
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, but the interface for layers isn’t as clear as that in Photoshop. 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 things like group portraits and for 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. ON1 saves layered image files in its proprietary ONPhoto file format, but the program can also 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 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—helpful for astro and landscape photography. Another special capability of the software is its resizing, which uses fractal technology to produce excellent results—particularly if you need to enlarge an image for a large print.
Mobile and Online
ON1 offers both mobile apps and a cloud service for syncing your photos and edits between phone and computer. The cloud storage is an extra cost service, however, at $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year for 100GB, which is expensive. Note this subscription is only available inside the mobile app. This means that there’s no web access to the photos, so the plan is mostly about syncing with ON1 running on a mobile device.
The ON1 mobile app offers decent camera controls and lets you shoot in raw if your phone is capable of that. Editing tools, too, are surprisingly rich here, with loads of filters and adjustments, though of course you don’t get everything that’s in the desktop app.
Sharing and Output
The Windows version of ON1 now offers direct uploading to SmugMug, but not Flickr or any other service; Lightroom Classic lets you send photos anywhere, with export plug-ins. The Mac version can directly share to social media because it uses macOS’s built-in sharing features. If only the Windows program were a Universal store app, it could get simple sharing to lots of outputs thanks to Windows’ built-in sharing.
On export, you can apply resizing, watermarks, sharpening, tiling, and gallery wraps. You can export to JPG, TIFF, PSD, PSB, and PNG. You can also target specific color spaces like Adobe RGB or import a custom color profile.
For printing, ON1 lets you specify a printer color profile, and you can even upload your own. You also now get the ability to print contact sheets and various standard layouts, which is better than Lightroom (non-Classic), which still doesn’t let you 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 available online or as a complete, downloadable PDF guide—better than Adobe’s hit-or-miss web-only help. The program also features a Learning Hub panel, accessible from the question mark icon at lower left; this offers links to tutorial videos on many topics.
How Does ON1 Perform?
During testing, I noticed that navigating around and switching between photos occasionally 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.
We test import speeds by intaking 515 24MP raw files in CR2 format from a Canon EOS 80D. Each file weighs in between 25-35MB. We test on a PC running 64-bit Windows 10 Pro with a 3.4GHz Core i7 6700 CPU, 16GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 with 4GB GDDR5 RAM. We import from a Class 10 SDHC card to a WD My Passport 082A USB drive.
ON1 does respectably on this test, taking 13:56 (minutes:seconds) to import test photos, compared with 15:38 for Lightroom Classic.
Is ON1 the One?
ON1, a relative newcomer in the photo workflow space, packs powerful correction, editing, and enhancement tools, combining some of Adobe Lightroom’s and Photoshop’s best features. Its dense interface is less intuitive than its Adobe competition, however, and workflow features like organization and output options fall short as well. ON1 does potentially save you the monthly tribute you pay to use Adobe’s software, with its one-time pricing option. Nevertheless, Lightroom Classic remains our Editors’ Choice pick for photo workflows for its superior interface and larger set of photo editing tools, while Photoshop earns the Editors’ Choice award for its overall photo-editing excellence.
