Veteran Member Registered: June, 2015 Location: South West UK Posts: 1,493 | | Review Date: February 4, 2018 | Recommended | Price: $89.00
| Rating: 8 |
| Pros: | Good value, well featured, layers, user driven development, perpetual licenses | | Cons: | buggy in places, lens support patchy, not quite as polished as LR | |
I have been back and forth on this for some time. After trying the demo for a few days, I initially gave up on it after encountering a persistent bug with it failing to identify any of my lenses and, frankly, my own issues trying to crowbar it into my LR-based workflow. It failed on a couple of major counts, being a lack of import process and a lack of LR-style collections.
Since then, their support have recognised the lens bug, and promised a fix in the next release (in a month), which incidentally includes some additional features which addresses other issues I had. After that I gave it a bit more of an open-minded try. During this time I found some bits I really loved, being:
Fast browsing and culling - they make a big deal of this. It IS fast, sure, but not massively faster than LR, however you can blaze through the most tedious process painlessly.
Development - It has all the basic tools I used in LR, plus haze reduction. It all works pretty well.
Effects - This is really it's strongest suit, with a huge array of 'filters' for everything from B&W to Glow and Grunge. Along with this come hundreds of presets, with more available to download, free and paid. These have all but eliminated my use of Nik plugins - although these are compatible if you want.
HDR & Pano - inbuilt modules that work super-quick and very well, again eliminating external software.
Local adjustments - these are great, far exceeding LR's capabilities. The Perfect Brush is excellent.
Healing and cloning works very well. Perfect Eraser works to remove spots and unwanted objects very well.
Layers - proper Photoshop style layer editing, including powerful layer masks
Perpetual licenses...this is a major pro for me.
All in all, it is extremely capable. It does have its downsides though:
Currently no import process, so copying files is done externally, no renaming or keywording on import, etc - however this is being added in the next update.
No soft proofing - again planned for the next update
Switching from browse to effects or develop modes is much slower than LR. When in develop mode, switching from image to image is equally slow. The idea is to first browse and cull, then develop images one-by-one, not flit around.
Cataloging is not up to LR's standards. However, by cutting it a little slack in this area I found I didn't miss it that much, and there is a development push in this area right now, so I expect it to improve.
Finally, it is weak in the area of 'auto' adjustments. Auto exposure, Auto WB, both come up with some crazy results at times. Personally, I don't care much since I always adjust manually, but it clearly doesn't have Adobe's polish here.
Finally, this software won me over. What helped was a good coupon that arrived some way into the trial - this might be a standard tactic, so I'd recommend using the trial awhile if you plan to buy. I ended up with the full software for $89 with a bunch of free presets and courses included. Shortly thereafter I was offered a year's 'Plus' membership for $49 which gets me the next full version on release, and a load of extra content and priority support and access to mentors. For the next month, until the next update I will be using LR to import and catalog, but otherwise I am already doing everything exclusively in On1.
If you're wanting to ditch LR, I'd really recommend trying the trial. But before you do, you need to forget LR and start with an open mind and use it how it was intended, not how you used LR.
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