# On1 to release a new (from the ground up) RAW converter and non destructive image editor.



## clee01l (Apr 26, 2016)

ON1 Unveils Photo RAW, the First All-New RAW Processor in a Decade

I own and use the On1 Photo10 plugin.  It is may favorite plugin for creating derivatives.

I'm encouraged to see On1 competitively engage Adobe's ACR.  They are promoting this as a replacement for ACR, Lightroom and Photoshop.   Pricing is annually $150USD and entitles the user to a perpetual license. The Annual costs entitles the user to continuous upgrades.   The end result is a product that might replace ACR & Photoshop  They don't call it a subscription, but it amounts to the same end result while retaining a perpetual license when ever the user stops the renewal.  I think a interesting licensing scheme that Adobe should have probably implemented  that would not have ruffled feathers of so many LR users. 

Perhaps the most glaring assumption is that this On1 product is a replacement for LR.  Without a DAM tool like LR, how are you ever going to be able to find the one image that you want out of the 10's of thousands of images processed and the derivatives that were generated as a result of the On1 post processing?  Perhaps there will be an ON1 Photo RAW plugin that will let you use the Excellent LR organizing tools and bypass the ACR Component of LR.


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## Jimmsp (Apr 26, 2016)

This makes interesting reading. It promises a lot, including a plug in for LR, and they imply a new Browse module. 
However, it seems a bit premature as the package won't become available until this fall.

I've tried most raw converters, even using Capture One for a number of years, but in the end workflow between the raw converters and a DAM brought me back to LR.
I'll probably try this one when a demo package comes out.

That said, with the competition (including Capture One) heating up, I would expect that LR introduces a new package and engine sometime this summer or fall.


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## Colin Grant (Apr 26, 2016)

I have tried the ON1 suite a couple of times and it is not that great; some of the brushes, the perfect brush in particular, are so sluggish they become almost unusable. This is especially so when the number of layers increases. Perfect Effects is a nice plug-in for LR and PS but that is as far as it goes in my view.

I would rather pay my subscription to Adobe and get the photographers CC.


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## Johan Elzenga (Apr 26, 2016)

Colin Grant said:


> I have tried the ON1 suite a couple of times and it is not that great; some of the brushes, the perfect brush in particular, are so sluggish they become almost unusable. This is especially so when the number of layers increases. Perfect Effects is a nice plug-in for LR and PS but that is as far as it goes in my view.
> 
> I would teether pay my subscription to Adobe and get the photographers CC.



This is not about the present plugins. This is something new, so a long as it is not available yet, nobody can make any comments about the speed. They claim it's very fast, so wait and see.


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## PhilBurton (Apr 26, 2016)

Jimmsp said:


> This makes interesting reading. It promises a lot, including a plug in for LR, and they imply a new Browse module.
> However, it seems a bit premature as the package won't become available until this fall.
> 
> I've tried most raw converters, even using Capture One for a number of years, but in the end workflow between the raw converters and a DAM brought me back to LR.
> ...



What exactly is it that Lightroom disappoints photographers, and the new On1 RAW convertor will deliver?  Does any of that list imply a new processing engine, or just additional functionality and perhaps some additional code optimization for 64-bit only operation?

Phil


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## PhilBurton (Apr 26, 2016)

JohanElzenga said:


> This is not about the present plugins. This is something new, so a long as it is not available yet, nobody can make any comments about the speed. They claim it's very fast, so wait and see.


 I always love it when someone's as yet unreleased product is "better" than today's released product.  As if today's product is frozen in time and can't catch up or even surpass.  That said, it's good for us as photographers to see someone assert that they can compete with Adobe.  

Phil


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## Colin Grant (Apr 26, 2016)

JohanElzenga said:


> This is not about the present plugins. This is something new, so a long as it is not available yet, nobody can make any comments about the speed. They claim it's very fast, so wait and see.


They have made claims about things being very fast before. I remain very much in the out camp. Sorry. LR/PS does all I need, it could be a little more responsive but it gets my vote. I am not likely to jump on some new band wagon with the associated learning curve. Interesting announcement yes - of interest to me no. So I will not wait and see.


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## clee01l (Apr 26, 2016)

PhilBurton said:


> What exactly is it that Lightroom disappoints photographers, and the new On1 RAW convertor will deliver?  Does any of that list imply a new processing engine, or just additional functionality and perhaps some additional code optimization for 64-bit only operation?
> 
> Phil


If you watch one of the video, they talk about almost instantaneous availability of 50mp RAW images.  ACR struggles with anything over 24mp.


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## Johan Elzenga (Apr 26, 2016)

Colin Grant said:


> They have made claims about things being very fast before. I remain very much in the out camp. Sorry. LR/PS does all I need, it could be a little more responsive but it gets my vote. I am not likely to jump on some new band wagon with the associated learning curve. Interesting announcement yes - of interest to me no. So I will not wait and see.



I'm not suggesting that it should be interesting to you, and I'm also not interested in any raw-converter that does not offer a full DAM option but only a browser. However, one can only make a final judgement if and when the product is available. Maybe what they'll offer as LR plugin may turn out to be interesting after all. At the very least, it could force Adobe to look at the (lack of) speed of Lightroom...


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## PhilBurton (Apr 27, 2016)

JohanElzenga said:


> I'm not suggesting that it should be interesting to you, and I'm also not interested in any raw-converter that does not offer a full DAM option but only a browser. However, one can only make a final judgement if and when the product is available. Maybe what they'll offer as LR plugin may turn out to be interesting after all. At the very least, it could force Adobe to look at the (lack of) speed of Lightroom...



The ideal would be a separate browser/RAW editor "closely coupled" with a separate DAM solution that was easy to use and sophisticated at the same time.  Such a DAM solution does not exist right now, so Lightroom in its current form is the best available _now_.  Also one of Lightroom's strengths as a DAM is the ecosystem of third-party plug-ins.  I just wish that Lightroom also had "user friendly" scripting tools suitable for non-programmers.

To the people who want Lightroom to be faster, that requires Adobe to invest more in multi-threading Lightroom.  At present, I believe that you gain performance in Lightroom by increasing CPU clock speed, not by increasing the number of CPU cores.  However, because of power consumption and heat dissipation issues, the industry trend is to increase CPU cores, not clock speed.

Phil


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## Johan Elzenga (Apr 27, 2016)

There are many ways in which Adobe can make Lightroom faster, and some don't require any hardware, but just clever thinking. For example: if you import 500 images into Apple Aperture, they become available for keywording and rating in _a few seconds_. That is not because Aperture can copy images way faster than Lightroom, it's because it uses a clever trick. Aperture reads all 500 images into its database long before they have actually been copied to the hard disk and uses the built-in previews to display them instantly. So while you are already rating and keywording, Aperture continues to copy the images to your hard disk in the background. That is a great time saver compared to the sluggish way in which Lightroom handles imports. Lightroom only displays those images that have been copied to the final destination. So after all these years of no development and even abandonment, Aperture (Photo Mechanic uses the same trick) is still superior in this respect. And all it required was thinking a bit out of the box.


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## Cerianthus (Apr 27, 2016)

As a veteran from rawshooter bibble capture one and after shot pro, I would say that I am not convinced that a superior program just drops from the sky.  After shot is a bit faster then Lightroom in conversions and doesn't require importing but it isn't updated as often and has some interface problems (at least when I left it) I've also been using a separate dam program called imatch, that has some interesting features but can do way too much for me. I quite like a one program does all


Verzonden vanaf mijn iPad met Tapatalk


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## Colin Grant (Apr 27, 2016)

JohanElzenga said:


> I'm not suggesting that it should be interesting to you, and I'm also not interested in any raw-converter that does not offer a full DAM option but only a browser. However, one can only make a final judgement if and when the product is available. Maybe what they'll offer as LR plugin may turn out to be interesting after all. At the very least, it could force Adobe to look at the (lack of) speed of Lightroom...



Agreed


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## tspear (Apr 27, 2016)

I would think Adobe is actually making steps towards "faster" perception on imports with some of the changes in 6. Now it copies the images, and adds them to the last import collection as it copies each image. You can keyword, facial tag and do everything else while it continues to copy. When done with the copy, Lr then starts to convert to DNG. The whole time, I am doing my facial tagging.


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## Colin Grant (Apr 27, 2016)

I shoot in RAW an retain my images in RAW within LR. Is there any benefit in converting to DNG?


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## Johan Elzenga (Apr 27, 2016)

tspear said:


> I would think Adobe is actually making steps towards "faster" perception on imports with some of the changes in 6. Now it copies the images, and adds them to the last import collection as it copies each image. You can keyword, facial tag and do everything else while it continues to copy. When done with the copy, Lr then starts to convert to DNG. The whole time, I am doing my facial tagging.



You're missing the point. You can keyword, facial tag and do everything else on those images that have been copied to your hard disk, but not on the images that have not yet been copied. Nothing has changed in that respect. And the addition to a collection happens at the very end, when *all* images have been copied, so that doesn't make it feel faster either. The only difference in LR6 is that conversion to DNG (if you do that, I don't convert to DNG) takes place after all images have been copied, if I'm not mistaken.

In Aperture and Photo Mechanic you can keyword (and facial tag in Aperture, I suppose) and rate *all* images right away, even those that have not yet been copied to your hard disk.


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## clee01l (Apr 27, 2016)

Colin Grant said:


> I shoot in RAW an retain my images in RAW within LR. Is there any benefit in converting to DNG?


There are some benefits. However, you don't want to destroy the original proprietary RAWs. So, you end up nearly doubling your storage space. And then there is new technological developments like this one that may work better if you do have the original RAW file.  DNG are still RAW and the data needs to be converted to RGB before it can be used by any post processor. And then there are also DNGs that are already in RGB. Adobe is also promoting lossy DNGs (Smart Previews). When you get a DNG, how can you tell without opening it which of these three type represents the data from the original lossless RAW file. 

Lightroom works equally well with a proprietary RAW or its DNG counterpart.  You can speed up the import process by skipping the DNG conversion.


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## Colin Grant (Apr 27, 2016)

Thanks for that. Helpful. 

To be honest I shoot Nikon and nowadays I tend to do work on RAW in Nikon's proprietary software (CNX-D), forwarding a Tiff to LR.


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## clee01l (Apr 27, 2016)

Colin Grant said:


> Thanks for that. Helpful.
> 
> To be honest I shoot Nikon and nowadays I tend to do work on RAW in Nikon's proprietary software (CNX-D), forwarding a Tiff to LR.


When Google bought Nix, Nikon was forced to start over with  software to be packaged with Nikon cameras. Most Nikonians consider CNX-D to be inferior to the Nik product NX-2.  It does lack the functionality and feature found in the old NX-2 product.  When Nikon had to start over, they subcontracted the work to Ichikawa soft laboratory Co., Ltd., the Japanese maker of a mediocre image processing software.   Many other Japanese camera Mfgs distribute a version of SilkyPix with their camera too. 
Most Nikonians (even those that are negative toward Adobe products) think ACR a superior RAW converter to what is offered by Nikon.  If you import your NEFs directly into LR, you don't have a derivative TIFF file to manage along with the NEFs


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## PhilBurton (Apr 27, 2016)

clee01l said:


> Most Nikonians (even those that are negative toward Adobe products) think ACR a superior RAW converter to what is offered by Nikon.  If you import your NEFs directly into LR, you don't have a derivative TIFF file to manage along with the NEFs



To Cletus' point here, at one time, Nikon could claim that they alone had built-in corrections for Nikon lenses.  No longer true, and if you are like me, with some manual focus Nikon lenses going back to the 1970s, you can even create your own lens profiles.

_Strategically_, there is no way that Nikon, a hardware manufacturer dabbling in software, _will or can afford to_ devote sufficient resources to its software to compete with Nikon or any other major RAW convertor software vendor.  I don't know anything about the software situation with Canon, but the same iron logic applies.

Phil


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## Colin Grant (Apr 27, 2016)

clee01l said:


> When Google bought Nix, Nikon was forced to start over with  software to be packaged with Nikon cameras. Most Nikonians consider CNX-D to be inferior to the Nik product NX-2.  It does lack the functionality and feature found in the old NX-2 product.  When Nikon had to start over, they subcontracted the work to Ichikawa soft laboratory Co., Ltd., the Japanese maker of a mediocre image processing software.   Many other Japanese camera Mfgs distribute a version of SilkyPix with their camera too.
> Most Nikonians (even those that are negative toward Adobe products) think ACR a superior RAW converter to what is offered by Nikon.  If you import your NEFs directly into LR, you don't have a derivative TIFF file to manage along with the NEFs



I think you are pushing the boat a bit when you say "most". There are many that will say CNX-D interprets Nikon colours far better than ACR and it also works well with the camera's on-board picture controls. CNX-D when it came out was rushed - version 1.4 is much better. ACR is more advanced given the selected editing capabilities but sometimes out of the camera with a few tweaks works and especially so when you are using software that is nef centric.


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## IanL (May 9, 2016)

clee01l said:


> Pricing is annually $150USD and entitles the user to a perpetual license. The Annual costs entitles the user to continuous upgrades.   The end result is a product that might replace ACR & Photoshop  They don't call it a subscription, but it amounts to the same end result while retaining a perpetual license when ever the user stops the renewal.  I think a interesting licensing scheme that Adobe should have probably implemented  that would not have ruffled feathers of so many LR users.



Interesting idea.  I like it.  If Adobe offered that kind of pricing I would be there.  Adobe's continued annoying execution on their subscription pricing is the reason I am keeping my eye on things like this release - and others.  I hope I don't have to switch away but it seems that I need to be thinking about it.


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## Colin Grant (May 9, 2016)

In what way do you see Adobe's pricing as so different? I pay about the same (GBP equiv) for Photographers CC.


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## Johan Elzenga (May 9, 2016)

Colin Grant said:


> In what way do you see Adobe's pricing as so different? I pay about the same (GBP equiv) for Photographers CC.



It's not the pricing that is different, it's the product. If you stop your subscription, Lightroom will not completely stop working, but it will become crippled. Your Develop module and your Maps module will no longer operate. In the perpetual licence/upgrades model, your application will simply not be upgraded anymore if you stop paying the yearly fee, but it won't become crippled.

By the way; Photoshop CC will indeed completely stop working.


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## Colin Grant (May 9, 2016)

Gotcha! Yes, I see the problem or potential problem. Let us hope Adobe take note. The trouble is I do not see On1 catching Adobe up any time soon. I have tried their products and they have not proven reliable and some of the brushes can be oh so slow.... That said, things do change so who really knows what is around the corner


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## clee01l (Apr 26, 2016)

ON1 Unveils Photo RAW, the First All-New RAW Processor in a Decade

I own and use the On1 Photo10 plugin.  It is may favorite plugin for creating derivatives.

I'm encouraged to see On1 competitively engage Adobe's ACR.  They are promoting this as a replacement for ACR, Lightroom and Photoshop.   Pricing is annually $150USD and entitles the user to a perpetual license. The Annual costs entitles the user to continuous upgrades.   The end result is a product that might replace ACR & Photoshop  They don't call it a subscription, but it amounts to the same end result while retaining a perpetual license when ever the user stops the renewal.  I think a interesting licensing scheme that Adobe should have probably implemented  that would not have ruffled feathers of so many LR users. 

Perhaps the most glaring assumption is that this On1 product is a replacement for LR.  Without a DAM tool like LR, how are you ever going to be able to find the one image that you want out of the 10's of thousands of images processed and the derivatives that were generated as a result of the On1 post processing?  Perhaps there will be an ON1 Photo RAW plugin that will let you use the Excellent LR organizing tools and bypass the ACR Component of LR.


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## happycranker (May 11, 2016)

Photomechanic is working on a new catalogue feature, which could be interesting for the future?


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## Johan Elzenga (May 11, 2016)

They've been 'working' on that for years, so it seems.


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## PhilBurton (May 11, 2016)

JohanElzenga said:


> They've been 'working' on that for years, so it seems.


I think at least six years.  Photo Mechanic Version 5 and Catalog Update

The way the competition often moves in software, if you wait too long, you have more and more work to do just to catch up.

Let's turn it around. What does Photo Mechanic still do that Lightroom doesn't do?  ... that couldn't be done with a plug-in?   Now reverse those questions.  What other software would you have to buy to match Lightroom functionality if you are a Photo Mechanic user?

A new license for Photo Mechanic is the same price as a new perpetual license for Lightroom.  Do the math.

Phil


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## Johan Elzenga (May 11, 2016)

I don't use Photo Mechanic, but I know it's used as an addition to Lightroom by photographers who need speed (sport photographers in particular). When Lightroom imports images, it only shows the image after it has been copied to the destination folder. That makes importing a large number of images very slow, and you can really do a lot of work until everything has been imported (you can't really cull or rate images if you can't see the whole series).

Photo Mechanic shows the images by reading the built-in previews from the memory card. That way, it can show you all images long before they have been copied to the destination folder, giving you the chance to start rating and culling right away. That's why some photographers use it to import images to their hard disk, and then import the culled selection into Lightroom later.


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## rob211 (May 11, 2016)

Johan is spot on (are you sure you don't use it?  ).

Given how well it works with Lr, it would surprise me if they went to their own catalog. In any case, no evidence of that. As PM has evolved it has taken on some more browser-ish features, which is its strength in addition to ingestion. I got frustrated with Lr's import and after the kerfluffle with the recent import module finally relented and bought PM, and it's been well worth it. And it even helps speed up metadata work post Lr import, since Lr still lags in that area (doing locations is much faster in PM for example, and so is using controlled vocab, scripting, etc).

BTW another really cool tool to use for ingestion is *FastRawViewer.* It is better for use when culling if you are concerned with say exposure, brackets, etc since the focus is more on the range in the RAW rather than just say how it looks in the preview as in Lr and PM. It too works very symbiotically with Lr. And it's scary fast (unlike On1's browser which I demo'd; in at least its current configuration it is quite slow on my machine). And FastRawViewer is all about using their own RAW conversion. Check it out; they have some interesting comparisons with ACR/Lr previews. Maybe I should have a separate thread about it....


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