Everywhere you look, you can find great photos. Also, inspiration can come at any time. ON1 RAW is a great platform where you can capture, edit, and organise images on the go.
The ON1 RAW camera allows you to capture pro-grade raw format photos with all the manual professional controls you need. You can edit anywhere you want. Adjust colours and tones using the same raw processing engine as ON1 Photo RAW.
I am sure that Photoshop is not replaceable. Another masterpiece is Lightroom. I will rather use ON1’s sorting technology and colour correction tools, then further move the images to Photoshop if necessary.
ON1 Photo RAW 2020 is fast. Its features include image organisation, various customisable image effects, fast and beautiful HDR, panoramas, masking and selection tools, layers in one app without any subscription. You don’t want to miss this!
About the App
ON1’s powerful camera mode works like your device’s camera app. It is a very easy application to use. Though it includes chock-full of advanced features, it doesn’t take much time to get accustomed to it.
You can capture RAW format images directly from your smartphone, something which you don’t expect. You get camera settings including all the tonal range and details you expect from an interchangeable lens camera.
It has professional-level manual control over exposure, shutter speed, depth and white balance. Pretty amazing, right?
ON1 Photo RAW uses a non-destructive image editing where the new edits don’t overlap om the original image. It allows batch processing and includes a BEFORE/AFTER photo comparison effect which is helpful.
The image editor offers a quick way of editing via tabs. It also has some easy-to-use modules which are pretty effective. You can also apply beautiful filters. They have a unique collection of them. Similar to Adobe Lightroom you can edit curves, adjust dimensions, export, share, and print. A heap of functionalities which you won’t regret.
Import and Organise
After opening the app, you don’t need to import your pics by creating a separate catalogue. You don’t have to download them from the folder either.
There is a “Browse” module with the help of which you can see all your necessary folders and images on your laptop.
You also have the opportunity to select between 4 photo view types. The people’s favourites are the Thumbnail and Filmstrip mode for a detailed look before and during editing.
The rating system is almost the same as in Lightroom, except they have added purple to coloured labels, the colour score is from 6 and to 0, and 1-5 is for star feedback.
You may add/delete photos out of your folders. Whatever you do there, all those actions are visible in the app. If you add a new photograph you don’t need to separately export it to the program.
It also works well in Quick Preview. You can connect your camera to the laptop and view all images in the Preview window at the left of the interface. You can easily take a look at your photos after that.
Adjusting and Editing
The most crucial part of the image editing work is done in the “Edit” mode, which is present on the right of the interface. Just like other photo editing software, this section also has several sliders associated with colour correction.
Adjusting colours here is as simple as in Lightroom. Since all tools are placed near to each other, it saves you a lot of time. The whole point of efficiency of photo editing apps lies in how much time it saves.
Develop is one of the tabs you use the most when working in ON1 Photo RAW. It includes the following settings:–
- “Tone”
- “Color”
- “Details”
- “Lens Correction”
- “Transform.”
They work exactly like Lightroom. Just adjust the sliders to the right or left as per your convenience. It comes with two exceptions: White Balance and Curves.
It is very helpful to have a miniature preview while adjusting the white balance with the Eyedropper tool. There’s no such feature here. Curves have a different issue. They are non-existent.
When it comes to the ON1 Photo RAW vs Lightroom battle, the former still needs to catch up in these few aspects.
Effects
Here you can adjust different colour effects and filters. You can also add a frame if you need one. The most useful function of effects that deserves a mention in this review is the Color Enhancer. You can use it to tweak specific colours and change their relative saturation. This feature makes it equivalent to “HSL.”
Portrait
This is a new and interesting mode which automatically detects faces in a photograph. After detection, you can edit them by simply moving the settings involving sliders.
It doesn’t work as perfectly as one may expect, but it’s still better than the horrible photo retouching capabilities of other applications. Additionally, this mode also allows you to select the subject’s eyes and lips for performing precise adjustments.
Local
This is an equivalent of the Adjustment Brush in Adobe Lightroom. Well, to be honest, it works worse than in Lightroom. The settings remain the same, you can create several points, etc.
However, one problem that’s worrying indeed is that the brush freezes constantly, which makes it nearly impossible to use this tool, and irritates you on some other level.
Conclusion
In this article, I have provided an honest review of ON1 Photo RAW. In some cases, I compared it with Adobe Lightroom. Some aspects are better here and some on the later one. I hope you have gained enough knowledge about this photo editing platform.
Comment your opinion!
Happy Editing!