I have been using on1 photoraw now for some years and I’m always searching for something better.

The problem is, I always end up in PR.

Through work I’ve got a Lightroom licence, and every year I give it a try and (just did it) it doesn’t work for me, somehow the program that I did use for years is really to slow, and the green worms you get with fuji are still there.

Is on1 photoraw perfect.
No, because then I wouldn’t be searching for something better, I’m using affinity photo for noise reduction (if I need to). I don’t like the catalogs that are somewhere on my c drive and eating processing power en disk space.

But for the price, support you get from On1 it’s coming close.

(ps i use it on a windows 10 system)

The most serious issue is performance. I’ve got a late 2015 model iMac with 3.3 GHz I7 processor, 16 GByte of RAM and a 2TB fusion drive. Lightroom just screams on my computer. ON1 Photo Raw, on the other hand, is extremely slow: it takes about 2 seconds to build a preview, it takes about 1.2 to 2 seconds for a develop adjustment to display. It takes a good 3 seconds when advancing to the next photo in Develop mode till the system is ready. It takes an extremely long time to export photos. I could go on, but you get the idea.

The next issue on the list is Lens Correction. If I import directly from my camera (Nikon D60) to ON1, there is no camera or lens information (either in ON1 or using Mac OS Finder) If I use Adobe Bridge, the camera and lens info is there (in Finder), but ON1 will not apply a Lens Profile. I can pick my Camera and Lens Manually, but it usually distorts the photo and I have to do a manual correction. ON1 says this is a bug in the software.

Smart collections and filters aren’t really very smart. The only option is “equals” and all rules are inclusive. I can’t do anything based on “does not equal” or “begins with” or “is either one or the other.” This makes filtering a real pain.

The next issue is also a real deal killer for me. It may be because my Camera is relatively old and is considered a pro-sumer model. Any (RAW) photos taken at ISO 800 or 1600 are really noisy. The same photos viewed in Apple Photos or Lightroom display little to no noise at all, and what noise is there is easily removed in Lightroom, but not in ON1 Photo Raw. ISO 3200 photos are impossible to clean up in Photo Raw, but clean up relatively easily in Lightroom.

I’ve purchased Photo Raw, but I’m forced to keep using Lightroom, occasionally using PhotoRaw as a Plug-in for special cases. That seems to work OK. Maybe the next update will fix all this, but somehow I doubt it. The impression I have is that the developers are focused on new features, and not usability or stability.

“Glowing” reviews of ON1 Photo Raw give potential users a false impression of this application. Check out the ON1 forums to get the “real” picture.