ON1 Photo RAW 2017 - Overview and selected features

ON1 Photo RAW 2017 is a complete photo editor that includes:

- A super-fast Browse module that lets you quickly cull, compare, tag and organize your photos;
- True non-destructive Raw editing capabilities in the Develop and Effects modules;
- Industry-standard image enlargement—with full print capabilities—in the Resize module;
- Layers, which lets you composite and blend images in a fully layered workflow.
ON1 Photo RAW 2017 incorporates a state-of-the-art Raw processor, which lets you work in a fully non-destructive workflow: you can quickly sort and view Raw photos in Browse, edit them in either the Develop or Effects modules without having to worry about saving your edits.
         If you use ON1 Photo RAW 2017 as a plug-in for another Raw editor (Lightroom, for example), using Photoshop format (.PSD) files will maintain all the layers and layer masks you create in ON1 Photo RAW 2017 and are recommended as your main file format.
         ON1 Photo RAW 2017 has five modules: Browse, Develop, Effects, Resize and Layers. Each module focuses on one task, giving you access to just what you need to get that task done. Browse handles all file-management operations; Develop and Effects perform non-destructive pixel editing; Resize is used to enlarge images, largely for printing to large-format printers; and Layers is a complete, layered workflow tool for compositing images.
         When used as a standalone photo editor, ON1 Photo RAW 2017 offers true non-destructive Raw editing capabilities. This means you can view your images in the Browse module, open a Raw file in Develop or Effects and apply edits—including cropping, healing and local adjustments—and ON1 Photo RAW 2017 will always be working with your original Raw file. At any point, you can go back to Develop or Effects and change any or all settings you have made.
         If you wish to export your photo, share it with online services, or add it to a layered document for compositing and editing in the Layers module, ON1 Photo RAW 2017 will apply your changes to a copy of the Raw file and let you save it in a number of popular file formats.
         ON1 Photo RAW 2017 has full printing capabilities built directly into the product, and you can print your photos from any module, using the Print command from the File menu.
         ON1 Photo RAW 2017 supports a number of additional file types that can be used in various modules, called Extras. You can create your own, or add extras downloaded from the ON1 website. You can use the Extras Manager.
         The Preferences window has six tabs: General, Files, Plug-Ins, System, Services, Photo Via. The Plug-Ins tab is specific to using ON1 Photo RAW 2017 as a plug-in for Photoshop or Lightroom, and lets you set up certain conditions when opening files from these apps. The tab SERVICES controls which online storage services are displayed in the Sources pane in Browse and Layers. Currently, ON1 Photo RAW 2017 supports Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive.
         Photo Via uses your Dropbox or Google Drive account to publish photos from your computer to your iOS devices. To configure Photo Via on your computer, choose the service you wish to use—Dropbox or Google—and sign in via the button in this tab.

         ON1 Photo RAW 2017’s Browse module is a powerful and incredibly fast photo browser and manager. It gives you one place to find, view and manage your images, no matter where they are located.
         Browse supports several common cloud storage services including Dropbox,  Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. All of these services keep local copies of your images on your computer, and Browse finds and monitors these locations automatically. If you edit an image stored in one of these locations they are automatically updated to the cloud.
         ON1 Photo RAW 2017’s Albums feature lets you organize or keep track of photos on a project, event or even a broader category like a portfolio. If you want to create albums that populate automatically based on criteria such as date, camera type, rating or more, you can use the Smart Albums feature.
         The Photo Panel - The panel on the right side of the screen contains information relative to the currently selected image in the Preview area.

         While most of ON1 Photo RAW 2017’s image-editing power is found within the Develop and Effects modules, you can perform many editing tasks on photos inside Browse.

         ON1 Photo RAW 2017 has a preset system that lets you save your complete editing settings from the Develop and Effects modules. These presets are always available in Browse. Because ON1 Photo RAW 2017 is non-destructive, going to either the Develop or Effects modules will display all of the settings applied by the preset. Once in those modules, you can adjust the settings, switch to another preset, or make any other editing changes.

         ON1 Browse lets you send images you are viewing to other applications for editing. This is done via the Send to option, which is available from the right-click contextual menu or the Edit menu. ON1 Browse automatically detects the common photo managers or editors and lists the latest installed version.

       The core of ON1 Photo RAW 2017’s photo-editing power is found in the twin modules of Develop and Effects. These modules share many common filters and tools, and were designed to let you work seamlessly on all of your pixel-editing tasks, from making basic tonal changes to your photos, to more complicated effects-based adjustments with masks and selections.

Develop is the module for performing basic global editing operations—adjusting tone and color, removing noise, sharpening and more. It is the perfect place to begin editing your photos, especially if you are using ON1 Photo RAW 2017 as a standalone editor.

Effects (discussed in Part 4, starting on page 75) has some of the same adjustment types as Develop, but it has more filters, sophisticated masking tools for applying effects to specific areas of your images, and a full range of blend modes to adjust your photos exactly as you like. Develop and Effects also share a Local Adjustment panel that lets you apply basic edits to parts of your photos, with either a gradient mask or a local adjustment brush. These adjustments include settings like exposure, highlights and shadows, contrast, detail, and more. If you use Photo RAW 2017 as your Raw editor of choice (in conjunction with Browse) all edits you make to an image are preserved non-destructively, and you can go back to any image at any time and make changes or corrections to it.

To edit your images, the Develop module has 11 adjustment panes found in the Overall Settings panel.

         The Lens Correction pane detects the lens used in a photo (from its metadata), and searches ON1 Photo’s internal lens database for an appropriate profile. If found, the profile will be applied automatically, reducing distortion, chromatic aberration and peripheral fall-off. further correction to a photo—you can make manual adjustments by clicking on the Manual triangle.

ON1 will regularly be updating lens profiles with forthcoming ON1 Photo releases.

         In addition to the primary adjustment panes, you can make local adjustments to portions of an image in ON1 Photo RAW 2017. You can apply these adjustments using either the Adjustment Brush or the Adjustable Gradient, and you can create as many local adjustments as you need on an image. Local adjustments are shared between the Develop and Effects modules.

         ON1 Photo RAW 2017 comes with more than 200 built-in presets, in more than a dozen categories, ranging from landscapes to portraits, color grading, film looks and much more. You can also create your own presets, or import presets from other ON1 users and photographers.You can create presets that apply Develop adjustments, Effects settings, and local adjustments that use the Adjustable Gradient tool, and any combination of these. You can perform a variety of operations on presets and preset categories, including importing and exporting presets (individually or by category), deleting individual presets, and hiding categories.

         If Develop is the base from which you start editing your photos, Effects is the finishing school. With more than 20 filters that can be stacked in any order, with extensive blending and masking options, Effects lets you create stunning, pro-level photos with ease. And, since it is built upon ON1 Photo RAW 2017’s non-destructive editing engine, you can go from Browse to Develop to Effects and back again, preserving your edits, masks and more without having to worry about saving multiple versions of your files.

While Develop and Effects share some tools and even some adjustment types, Effects is much more customizable in how adjustments—called filters in Effects—are applied.

         Filters - Filters are the building blocks of Effects’ editing power. Each filter is an adjustment type, much like the basic adjustment panes inside Develop, but Effects filters have much more functionality than the basic panes inside Develop. Each filter is like a movable, editable layer over the base image you are working on. The Effects module has 23 filter types, found in the Overall Settings panel (they are also accessible via the Filters pane on the left side of the window).

         Effects has 23 filter types available for you to use inside ON1 Photo RAW 2017. Each filter has a set of styles in the top row, providing a range of popular or useful options for using that filter. You can also save your own preset styles by clicking the More pop-up at the end of the Styles row.

         CROSS PROCESS - This filter simulates the effect of processing film deliberately with the incorrect chemistry. It creates unnatural colors and high contrast.

         DYNAMIC CONTRAST - Dynamic contrast adds clarity—also known as tonal contrast—to your image, making it pop. It can be a strong effect, so it is often combined with masks to help lessen the effect in certain areas of an image (clouds in a sky, for example, often look surreal with too much Dynamic Contrast applied to them).

         HDR LOOK - This filter recreates the HDR style of tone mapping, with accentuated edges and sharpening. This one, like dynamic contrast, often benefit from masking or blend modes. Settings for this filter include: Compression, Detail, Clarity, Highlights, Shadows, Vibrance, Glow.

         TEXTURES - The Textures filter places a texture over the image to add a stylized look and is similar to the Borders filter in scope and functionality. ON1 Photo RAW 2017 comes with an extensive set of textures that you can add to your photos, ranging from fabric, metal, stone, text and more. You can also import your own textures directly into the Borders filter pane, or via the Extras Manager (available in Browse). Texture files can be almost any image format (JPEG, TIFF, Raw or Photoshop).

         Effects and Develop share five tools between them: the Crop tool, the Perfect Eraser, Retouch Brush, the Clone Stamp and the Zoom Tool. The unique tools inside Effects are related to the creation and refinement of masks.

         ON1 Resize lets you get the highest quality photo enlargements, using the patented, industry-standard Genuine Fractals algorithms to enlarge photos without the loss of sharpness or detail. It includes the following features:

- Complete control over adjustment size and resolution

- Crop and level

- Sharpening

- Multiple resize algorithms let you get the highest quality results with any subject matter

- Add film grain

- Crop to common preset sizes for different paper and screen sizes

- Add gallery wrap wings for printing on canvas

- Divide an image into tiles for printing mosaics or murals

- Crop, resize, and print all in one place without having to create a new file

         ON1 Resize should be used as one of the last steps in your workflow before printing. The power of ON1 Resize is in the concept of resolution on demand. You can work with a modest size file, which makes your editing faster and takes less hard drive space and memory. In ON1 Resize, you can adjust your image size using either theDocument Size pane or the Crop Tool Options Bar.

         The Document Size Presets make it easy to crop and resize your photo at the same time. Simply select one to set the width and height automatically. This also selects the Crop Tool so you can adjust the document size to fit your photo. You also control your resolution, known as pixels per inch or dots per inch. The Pixel Dimensions pane displays the flattened, uncompressed image size in pixels as well as the file size,

bit-depth and scaling factor.

         ON1 Resize features three sharpening methods: Unsharp Mask, High Pass, Progressive.

         The Film Grain setting controls the amount of simulated Film Grain

(noise) to your image. Adding a modest amount of grain can make your

image appear sharper visually and can help hide imperfections (such as

JPG artifacts).

         Export is a special panel that is available throughout ON1 Photo RAW 2017. It the engine for the export process, whether you’re exporting final files from within Browse, Develop or Effects, or from within Resize. The Export pane gives you much of the power of Resize in a quick and easy to use panel, letting you export your photos with incredible flexibility, ease and control.The Export pane is always available, from any module, as long as you have a photo selected (you can also batch export files selected as a group in Browse).

        Layers provides you with an easy-to-use workspace for editing your photos using a full-featured layered workflow. Because it is designed to be a compositing tool, it is important to note that Layers generally is a destructive environment, unlike the Browse-Develop-Effects workflow. You can use Layers’ Smart Layers feature to re-edit a layer in Develop or Effects, however. Layers has a built-in file browser, a robust set of selection and transformation tools, all in a layered environment.

Built into Layers is a file browser, located in the left panel. You can use it to browse your images as well as content you download from the ON1 website. Use the Transform Tool at the top of the tool well to manipulate layers. A layer may be repositioned, sized or rotated using the Transform Tool.

         Box Mode - The Quick Mask Tool is generally used as brush but it has a second option called Box Mode. This mode is perfect for when your subject is isolated and not touching the edges of your image.

         The Chisel tool works to remove fringes or halos along hard edges. Fringes are common when the background to be removed is brighter than the foreground. The chisel works like a chisel or plane in a wood shop. It removes just a sliver along the edges. The Chisel tool only works on the edges so you don’t have to be too careful when using it.