Like a lot of people, I am anticipating the full release of On1 Photo Raw in January. It seems like this release has been due for ages. I actually bought the product months ago as a pre-registration. It seems it was more like a crowdfunding tactic than a genuine discount offer. Anyways, I think it will be worth waiting for.
I have the pre-release version but it is not very usable – it doesn’t even have a histogram. ON1 are spending a lot of time hyping the product and giving away demos and publishing YouTube videos about the joys of ON1 Photo RAW, but when you watch someone editing in a promo or demo video they carefully skirt round the bits that are missing.
Nevertheless, this looks like a genuine rival to Lightroom. Since the launch of ON1 Photo RAW was announced, I bought Adobe Photoshop Lightroom anyway. I decided that it’s a must have for anyone who wants to be serious about photography. I managed to source LR 6 as a download, not as a subscription. I think ON1 RAW will be a good complement to Lightroom. Lightroom can do most of the heavy lifting and ON1 Photo RAW will have the ability to tweak some of that, add filters and / or presets and to generally enhance what is already done in Lightroom. There are many ways to combine a post production workflow using both products. It will be perfectly possible to use just On1 Photo Raw but it doesn’t have the organisational abilities of Lightroom and it remains to be seen how many camera/lens profiles it will support to provide lens corrections and aberration removal.
I want to improve my knowledge of the organisational side of Lightroom and I have begun watching a couple of videos that ON1 are giving away as part of what I can only term a ‘sweetener’ to those ON1 RAW subscribers that are still waiting for their full product.
The videos are by a great photographer called Colby Brown (http://www.colbybrownphotography.com) who travels to some amazing places all over the world. But, he is also a Lightroom expert and I am learning a lot.
The third product I have begun to use is really a suite of products called the Nik collection provided FREE by Google https://www.google.com/nikcollection This offers tools to remove noise, sharpen, create HDR effects and a number of other optios which are a nice supplement to what ON1 offers and it’s all FREE so if you don’t want to spend a lot of money on sophisticated products like Lightroom or On1 Photo Raw, then try this suite.
I had an old, low-res image of my brother-in-law from about 10 years ago when I was using a cheap point and shoot Kodak digital. I processed this with the Nik suite then removed some colour noise with Lightroom and produced this:
He’s given up smoking now, by the way.