From an Also Ran to a Thoughbred

I first started using Onone perfect Effects products as add-ins to lightroom, so long ago that I can’t reliably remember. They were great little tools that did simple things but with beautiful results. However, they suffered from the round trip of exporting from lightroom and then re-importing the result. There were all those temporary files. Still, they brought magic to the art of post-processing and Lightroom and Onone made a great team.

OnOne Effects were improved in several steps and started to offer a lot of advanced tools/effect that made it progressively more competitive with Photoshop, including some masking and layer features. They were still add-ins to Lightroom.

Sometime later Onone rebranded to On1. In the shape of things to come On1 Effects was released as a standalone photo editor. Not long afterwards On1 bought out a RAW rendering feature and then the ability to browse that meant it no longer needed lightroom. So it had become a standalone photo editing suite, with the ability for advanced photo editing features and particularly layers. People soon realized it was not only a competitor to lightroom, but also to the lightroom/photoshop combination. The biggest difference was that  On1 Photo RAW was a lot simpler to learn and use than the adobe products without the need to do a round trip, saving time. I stopped using Lightroom around this time.

At each upgrade various AI functions were introduced, starting with context-sensitive retouching, refinements to Masking, and especially a number of Portrait AI tools (which could find and differentiate eyes, lips, teeth, hair & skin etc). it all seemed very magical.

Next came the sky replacement wars. On1 may not have been the first but its AI-driven features made it a standout choice. I’m not sure why there was so much hype around this feature. It was easy and fun to use but I haven’t used it much. This is the time that AI tools became important additions to any serious photo editing and management package (Adobe have been doing a fair bit of catch-up) and there was significant improvement being added with each upgrade (but the upgrades were also becoming more expensive!

The latest version of On1 Photoraw 2023.1 is now out (I haven’t pushed the upgraded button just yet) and it really appears loaded with the sort of feature I have been looking for around better segmenting photos and refining masks. Even an adaptive preset feature knows what segments can be altered in different photos.