On1 Photo Raw – I’m all in

A while back, I got an email from a visitor to this site about On1 Photo Raw. She was frustrated with some annoying bugs in the product, and was thinking about switching to Lightroom, a product she did not have a lot of experience with. I have used both in tandem for a long time, and written about them, so she was interested in my viewpoint.

It was a great question at an interesting time. I was also frustrated with a few specific bugs in Photo Raw, but I had recently completely switched to it 100% after many years with Lightroom. Would I also switch back? I had already decided no, but the question spurred me to put in writing the reasons why, for On1 Photo Raw – I’m all in.

Lightroom and On1 Photo Raw

I have been using Lightroom and Photoshop for 16 years or so, and I have never stopped my Adobe subscription even after the switch (largely because of nervousness about accessing my huge LR catalogue). I have been using On1 for 11 years, since the early days of Photo Suite, when It didn’t remotely have the functionality to replace LR/PS. Up till last year, my core database was still Lightroom and I used On1 as a sort of plug-in. That resulted in a very convoluted workflow which I described in a couple of posts like this one.

About a year ago, I decided to fully transition from LR to On1. Despite the hassle I’ve had since, I don’t intend to change back, although I’ve thought about it a few times. I’m not saying that others shouldn’t move to Lightroom, but here are the reasons I’m staying with On1. They may not apply to everyone, but for what it’s worth, I’ll list them out here.

Functionality

Lightroom does not remotely have the functionality of On1 Photo Raw. It doesn’t do layers at all and doesn’t do filters. Also, it’s local (masked) processing isn’t as advanced as with On1, and it has far fewer tools to edit masks once created. For relatively simple single image processing, Lightroom can do the job. But to do the processing I need, which almost always involves layers and filters, working with Adobe requires both Lightroom (LR) and Photoshop (PS). So only one program is needed with On1, but two are needed with Adobe. Photoshop brings massive additional functions, but absolutely destroys the user interface and simplicity of a single application.

Dynamic Contrast and other functions

I could have made this post much shorter by simply writing “Dynamic Contrast” (DC) as the reason to use On1 and just leave it there. It is still by a country mile, the standout feature of Photo Raw, and is so capable and sophisticated I use it for almost every shot. I’m not going to describe it, but take my word for it, DC is light years ahead of the texture and clarity sliders in LR.

Dynamic contrast is a filter in On1 and there are numerous other incredibly powerful filters also available, to change or enhance colour (or even copy over LUTs), to replicate physical polarizing or colour filters, manage the gamma curve, add fog, and around 20 more. Nothing remotely like this exists in Lightroom. I’m not going to cover the rest of the benefits of On1 over LR, but there are very many beyond layers and filters.

Catalogue management and smart albums

After using both products in tandem for 10 years plus, the trigger functionality that moved me to On1 was their addition a few years back of Digital Asset Management (DAM). In Lightroom, this is exceptionally clumsy. No work can be done on an image without importing it, even if all that is wanted is a quick tweak to a throwaway picture. The LR catalogue quickly becomes huge and unwieldy, and cannot be transported or shared. It always has to be attached to a main device, with complex workarounds being needed. You cannot browse uncatalogued images in LR except via the crap import dialogue.

The situation is quite different in On1 Photo Raw. Firstly, an image does not need to be in the catalogue to be worked on or browsed. Also, an image does not need to be imported to be catalogued. You simply designate the folder containing the image as being in as the catalogue. If you want to go through the full import and catalogue process with On1 you can, including renaming and key wording files, applying metadata presets, and storing in designated folders. It’s just not compulsory. On1 supports IPTC metadata and Geotagging just as well as LR, so there is no difference to the sophistication of the metadata.

In another key difference, On1 supports Smart Albums just like LR. However, the On1 Smart Albums are integrated into the overall search architecture, with powerful metadata and attribute elements that can be stacked up for powerful searches, and then saved as Smart Albums. The search and Smart Album interfaces are entirely different with Adobe, so it is less intuitive or useful.

Catalogue portability

A considerable benefit of On1 Photo Raw is that I can have everything, the (three) caches, the database, and the photo library all on a single drive. I keep this on a fast 2TB NVME external drive, and I can back up the entire thing onto my network in one go. If I need to run my entire On1 system on another machine, I just install the main application on that system, plug in the external NVME drive, and I am up and running. Everything is there.

This is totally not the case with Lightroom. There are parts of the core data and caches that MUST be on the host PC, and properly backing up is a nightmare of finding obscure subdirectories in the appdata/roaming subfolders. This makes LR processing when away from the main system needlessly complex.

Simplicity of operations

Whatever anybody tells you, LR and PS are totally different programs that operate in totally different ways. Lightroom is complex but quite usable once you learn it. However, Photoshop is an absolutely Byzantine behemoth which I still don’t fully understand (after 16 years) and which is far too complex for a photographer’s needs.

It takes far longer in the Adobe LR/PS suite to do the same job as On1 Photo Raw and there’s far more to remember in terms of instructions and commands. Both LR and PS programs fully overlap in raw processing, but the main user interface is wildly different between the two. The user experience in each is so far apart it’s absolutely laughable. Elderly photo hands who have suffered this nightmare over many years got used to it, and embraced it in the end. That’s just Stockholm syndrome, and it is profoundly unnecessary because integrated applications like On1 (and Luminar – see below) now exist.

It’s also worth noting that Adobe actually has three different photography products, which they will never be able to integrate. Along with Photoshop, there are currently two parallel versions of Lightroom, and I won’t even get into their idiotic naming. The newer one, which Adobe thought was going to be the future, has been widely rejected by professionals and advanced amateurs. It is on an entirely different codebase than Lightroom Classic (the Lightroom that I and everyone else uses).

It’s only because Adobe is making obscene amounts of money that they haven’t had to crater one of these. The cratering will likely come once integrated products like On1 and Luminar start taking serious chunks out of their profits.

Simple and compact file structure

When you do a complex edit using filters on a Raw file with On1 Photo Raw, what you have at the end of it is a compact On1 XMP file and the raw file. Even with layers, you end up with a relatively compact multi-layer Onphoto file that is about the size of the combined RAW files.

It’s far more complicated with Adobe. When you pass a file from LR to PS, you have to save it in Tif format, which is a minimum of three times the size of the raw file. After it’s edited in PS, It gets even bigger – typically around 200 to 300 Mb for an Olympus file for a single layer image.

You then pass the file back to Lightroom, but in that file you cannot go back and change the edits you made before sending it to Photoshop. Also, once back in LR, you cannot change any of the edits made in PS. All you can do is further edit the PS file. So you end up with 3 files: the original RAW file, the tif you saved from Lightroom, and the tif you got back from Photoshop. Just keeping track of this. I find a complete pain in the backside.

File sizes and complexity

Pretty obvious point, but the amount of storage required with the Adobe suite is enormously more than with On1, and it’s much more complex to keep track of because you have to make sure you don’t lose multiple files.

A good example is that when you copy or move a multi-layer file in On1, all the relevant files are moved. In Lightroom, only the Raw file is moved, and you have to manually move the intermediate Photoshop and TIF files yourself.

Completely non-destructive process

In On1 Photo Raw I can reverse every single edit I make, including layers, right back to the very beginning of the editing process. Not so in Adobe. Apart from the freezing of the editing process when transferring from LR to PS and back, there is a further problem: while Lightroom uses a non-destructive editing process, the inherent methodology of Photoshop is destructive, that is to say edits, particularly filters cannot be reversed. You can delete and/or recreate the filter, but not edit it after the fact, it as you can in On1

You can avoid this by creating “smart layers” in Photoshop, but this then increases the size of the file hugely. I have had files come back from Photoshop close to a gigabyte in size when using smart layers.

Speed of editing and revision

Another obvious point, but because of the integrated nature of On1 Photo Raw, I can do really complex edits far faster than I could do in Adobe. There is no file export and import, and none of the infuriating process of tagging and/or renaming intermediate files to make the “keeper” file naming consistent.

Most importantly, I can return to an edited image and change the way it looks, months or years afterwards in a way that is impossible in Adobe, particularly if the key edit was in layers (frozen in the PS file) or initial Raw processing (frozen in the initial LR TIF export).

Fewer structural limitations

Adobe has infuriating limitations. Here is one example. When you bring multiple layers in, you need to align them exactly. On1 Photo Raw doesn’t always do this well and sometimes fails to rotate images even if they need to be rotated to align properly. Photoshop does a much better job here of alignment. But it will not align smart layers. So if you bring layers into PS, and want to align them, then all subsequent edits are destructive. I’d much rather have a slight limitation of On1 than the ridiculous structural limits of Photoshop.

Bugs

On1 has bugs, no question. For me, they are on the periphery of my mainstream workflow, so they are not showstoppers. One classic one is that focus stacking immediately crashes my AMD system. I now have a speedy workflow using Helicon (required for macro anyway) that is 1000% better than On1 and Photoshop.

Adobe products are also full of bugs. I had a particularly annoying sequence with On1 support a while back, which involved complex layers of large Nikon Z7 raw files. Because I had actually lost data, I went back to Adobe for this sequence of photographs. It also crashed, so I had to return (carefully) to On1 again. If you look at the forums, you will find that there is a history of buggy code being released by Adobe.

I also find that successive releases of On1 Photo Raw usually fix the problem. For what it’s worth, Photo Raw seems best supported and most reliable in this priority order: Apple M1-4 CPU/GPU>Intel CPU/Nvidia GPU>AMD CPU/Radeon GPU. This also applies to performance, I believe.

However, also FWIW, I use an AMD/Radeon system exclusively for my On1 processing, and it works well enough for me to stay with On1 and give Adobe the boot.

Responsiveness of On1 technical support

There is no possibility at all of receiving any kind of individual reply or follow-up to a bug report to Adobe. All you can hope is that enough people complain that Adobe will fix it in the next release. On the other hand, I find the responsiveness of technical support with On1 Photo Raw to be astonishingly good. I typically get an instant response from Stevie at level 1 and because I know what I’m talking about, I’m frequently transferred to level 2 support, which is where I am right now with a bug I just reported.

I’ve even had a direct email from Dan Harlacher, who is the VP of Product, and the main technical Guru at On1. Imagine a VP at Adobe writing to a peon user! Even Adobe fans will agree that just never happens.

Speed of development

This is both a plus and a minus. I’ve rarely had an On1 Photo Raw technical issue or a bug that has persisted through time. It’s almost always picked up at the next point release. The downside of this is that the next release will sometimes bring its own new problem. But the functionality of On1 continues to get better, and this is enabled by their underlying integrated architecture. Adobe has structural issues which they will never be able to overcome because PS and LR are entirely different programs that they can never integrate.

What about AI? Surely its all about AI?

Not for me. You will note that none of the key differences I cite between Adobe and On1 involve AI. I am far more concerned with the deeper architecture, file structure and core capabilities.

AI is great, but it’s a moving target. Just now, in terms of headline AI capability, I would say that On1 Photo Raw is ahead of Lightroom, but that Topaz is ahead of both. In noise reduction, the king is DxO, although they don’t trumpet an AI revolution when they describe it.

In capability terms, On1 now does the final thing that I went to PS for, which is generative fill on an expanded canvas. Super select AI masking, and depth masking in On1 are also excellent and pretty unique. However, I would never move to a RAW editor because of AI functions, not least because there is a new AI leader every week, and much of the trumpeted function is not useful or doesn’t work.

What about the Adobe subscription model versus the On1 purchase model?

Irrelevant in my opinion. Adobe costs me £10 per month. The annual cost is trivial, and it’s worth every penny in terms of being a reasonable charge for some very capable and complex code. I don’t use it much, but at £120 per year it costs way less than the money I spend on lenses, cameras, tripods, and bags that I never use.

With very few exceptions (one of whom is the estimable Thomas Stirr), most serious photographers upgrade their RAW software every year or at least every other year. I have Topaz AI, DxO Photo Lab and On1 as well as the Adobe suite. I pay to upgrade all of them every year if there is useful function. Why not, if they make a small sensor less noisy, or a cheap lens as sharp as it needs to be?

Overall, I think the revolution in software is utterly spectacular, and the price of it is also quite amazing. I don’t quibble with it.

Conclusion

I would summarise this way. If you don’t need layers, and you don’t need complex filters, then Adobe Lightroom works OK. Functionally, Lightroom by itself is manageable, can be mastered relatively easily and works well for simple images. For new users who want, or will want more complex processing, my personal advice is to stay away from the LR/PS route because you will spend vastly more time trying to understand and make it work than you will lose trying to resolve or work round On1 bugs.

There are other options for processing, like DxO photo lab (which I use for bulk denoising), but if you require your photo software to have DAM functionality then the main other alternative is Luminar. However, I have not gone to Luminar or even bothered trying it because its layer capability is not as sophisticated as On1 and won’t do what I need.

Overall, imperfect and occasionally frustrating as it is, there isn’t better option for me than On1. It occupies a very similar position to Olympus cameras in that regard. There are clear limitations for the Olympus system and in certain areas there are more complex and better solutions. But there’s nothing that fits my needs better than Olympus M43 overall, and the same goes for On1.