I have spent several hours over the last few days digging into the competitor product ON1 Photo Raw. They have announced their new 2021 version coming in October with a bunch of new features, some of which are appealing to me. I already own a license for the 2020 version (I got it at a great discount).
So… the only reason I won’t switch is that the RAW conversion is nowhere near as good as PhotoLab’s. Image quality is what matters most to me but there are many, many things that ON1 does way better. My opinion only, but ON1 have a very compelling product and if people don’t know about PhotoLab’s RAW conversion capabilities, I don’t see why they would give it a second glance.
Strange how experiences differ. I too had 2020 but went for a refund which in fairness ON1 were happy to provide. I hated the workflow, found images looked over sharpened and the software generally buggy, especially in the masking areas. Overall it just tended to overdo things, I know one can dial back but even that did not make it work for me. I do not see it as an alternative to Lr/Ps but it does have a reasonable DAM so file management is better than PL. I appreciate that some do not want to see PL develop the DAM too far so that might not be seen as an advantage by all.
Just about the entire interface is “nicer”. There are more controls visible in easy to use places. It starts up quicker and performs better in general use (though not as well as I’d like). It simply has more features. I prefer the way it handles view/edit. There are (ahem) more creative options. And if I’m honest, the fact the DAM is full featured is probably mostly what I notice. Then add ON1 360 and it goes to a whole new level with syncing your photos between computer(s) and mobile (remember you cannot even reliably use one PL3 library on more than one computer). The next version is adding some significant new features, which includes iterating on the DAM because they already have the basics done well. They’re also polishing the already-good UI. You can do HDR and pano in the app and they’re enhancing that with batch.
So to answer your question, some “for instances” are that it has so much more to offer and it offers it all up very well. It is a well rounded product that is unfortunately saddled with poor RAW conversion (in my opinion).
Very interesting. I’m intrigued by the term “over sharpened.” Does that mean, in fact, “over processed” in an attempt to look sharp? Because I can drag PL3’s sharpness slider well past the default and things get way sharper but no-one has ever suggested my images look “over sharpened.”
As for buggy, yes I did hit some, and the performance seemed a little inconsistent on my low powered system. But… let’s not forget some of the other threads here! Local adjustments for one.
I also saw cropping as an issue. At higher magnifications details get clumped together compare to PhotoLab and you lose detail. I even notice images in ON1 becoming pixilated when PhotoLab images at the same magnification are not. But mostly, I hated the workflow. As an example, in PhotoLab you can adjust Global and local settings at the same time. In ON1 local adjustments are only available in a separate tab.
Over sharpened is how they looked to me. You might call it over processed/crunchy whatever you like but either way they look awful on my Mac and that is without any processing on my part. You only have to go to the ON1 groups to see how many long term users are less than happy with the software and its bugs. Some are even saying the 2020 upgrade is not worth having.
If ON1 works for you that great. I owned 2018, 2019, and 2020 and will not upgrade to 2021 this year. In fact around a month ago I finally decided to uninstall it from my machine.
The interface is convoluted and requires way to much jumping around to get things done. Performance on my machine, compared to PhotoLab has been mediocre at best. It has a million filters, but a large number of them are slight variations of each other. Once familiar with PhotoLab most of those filters can be emulated.
Going back and forth between PhotoLab and ON1, I found very few things in ON1 that I couldn’t do better and more quickly in PhotoLab. Of course ON1 has a lot of additional features that PhotoLab does not, but after 3 years of owning ON1, I realized that i rarely or never used many of those features anyway.
Additionally, on countless occasions I tried to get the same results in ON1 that I was able to get in PhotoLab but was consistently disappointed by the results. You can see why in the attached pictures. ON1 is unable to display fine detail as magnification increases, and details get clumped together and pixelization becomes an issue. All the tools, and the bells and whistles, do not count for much if the results are not good.
See the attached images and the crops at high magnification. The crops are at about 300% magnification.
Both images look like hell !! The PL image size is larger than ON1 to start with and wondering who crops a file size like that, so heavy. In addition the cropped size pf the of file is twice the size of the On1…
No question that PL renders a raw file a bit better than most. However, no question that most editors offer a more complete toolbox than PL at this time.
As usual different stokes for different folks. I get acceptable results with both, but just looking to limit the file movement to different software to complete. PL is almost there, for MY needs ??
No looking for a battle, just a few more editing tools,
Regards
Mike
My example was a only a quick and dirty edit intended to demonstrate ON1’s inability to display fine detail when magnified. Even at less than 100% zoom, the clumping, of fine detail into a blob and the loss of detail is often quite noticeable.
My extreme crops were only intended to make this effect more visible. Download and compare the uncropped images yourself at virtually any magnification and you will see the loss of detail in the ON1 version throughout the image.
I have tried this with a huge number of images over the years often with the same results. In addition, using ON1’s mediocre noise reduction only exacerbates the problem and turns fine detail into a plastic mess. Sometimes the loss of detail isn’t as obvious until it is compared directly to a PhotoLab version.
ON1 often will produce the level of detail I would expect, but too often it does not. The results with ON1 are inconsistent. and I can’t rely on them. .
Just looking at the two large un-cropped images it is possible to see a loss of ‘texture’ detail in the ON1 file without even needing the illustrated cropped area you have shown.
Wait for the winter then you know the real hell!
Now it are only mosquito’s and total boredom i imagine.
Every time i play with Prime i find the remarkeble detailing under heavy denoising quite appealing.
sure there are more aplications which can produce nice denoised images.
but not as easy as this.
Here is another example of a test I did between PhotoLab and ON1. I was not attempting to match colors or white balance at the time for this comparison so there is a big difference between the two. The sky in the Photolab version was modified using local adjustments and is admittedly somewhat too intense. The ON1 image is on the left and the PhotoLab 2 image is on the right. The image was taken in September 2018. The output jpeg from both versions was created from the original raw file. The PhotoLab jpeg was somewhat larger. The image was captured with the Tamron 18-400 mm lens which is a very convenient vacation lens but not a very good one optically. The location is Nova Scotia.
I was very careful when applying adjustments in ON1. Since I owned the software I wanted it to succeed. If it had met my expectations I might have started using ON1 often due to its greater number of features when compared to PhotoLab 2 . This particular image was edited in the 2019 version if I recall correctly. I generally spent around 3 to 4 times as long working on the ON1 versions of my images than with the PhotoLab versions. From the beginning I struggled to get the ON1 versions to look the way I wanted them to, and with the same level of detail as PhotoLab. I almost always could not. The results I got with this image trying to retrieve fine detail in ON1 was better than I usually was able to achieve, but it still did not compare well to PhotoLab 2. .
The comparisons were done in FastStone Viewer. Note the significantly greater fine detail in the PhotoLab version. The quality of the output from the current 2020 version of ON1 is no different which is why I recently decided to uninstall it after living unhappily with 3 versions of this software that in the end was just taking up disk space…
The first comparison is at 35% zoom and is uncropped. The ON1 version is on the left…
Yes, which is the key reason I will not go with ON1.
And while I cannot claim to have used ON1 enough to truly compare performance with PL3, I can say that PL3’s performance is not good enough. It gets in my way on every photo.
Thanks for the examples, however. I would expect a file that has 21.8 MB more pixels to have a little more detail. It would appear we are comparing ON1’s file of 13.9MB to PL’s file of 35.7MB.
Again, PL works great with my RW2 20.3 MB files and I have never questioned PL image quality.
It’s the finishing touches I have a problem with. A basic feature request that was closed/noted and votes released should take over 2 years to complete? And by the way still not available.
Looking forward to news of features and improvements in PL4!!
I can’t comment on your situation of course. On my 4 year old machine PhotoLab’s performance is still fast and much faster than ON1 Photo Raw 2020 or Affinity Photo…
I just exported the original raw version edited in PhotoLab again, this time from PL 3.3, and at a slightly lower resolution than the ON1 jpeg, I compared them again and the results to my eye are virtually identical to my earlier post. The same raw file was used to generate both versions. I hope this answers your concern.
Mark
The first comparison is at 35% zoom and is uncropped. The ON1 version is on the left…
