UKC

A heads up for those looking for a change of photo editor.

ON 1 are doing an anniversary sale with the cheapest prices I’ve ever seen for outright purchase. Free trial seems still available, but at a price from £36.58 for a fully functioning standalone editor it wouldn’t be a huge cost if it didn’t workout I reckon. It is the current 2025 version, which has just had it’s 2nd update released.

I’ve no connection to ON1 other than as a user for a few years now. Moved from Lightroom after I couldn’t shift my Adobe LR purchases to a new computer and didn’t want a subscription. I’m not a demanding user in post processing and mostly just use the more basic stuff in ON1 for raw conversion and tweaks, but it works for me at hobby level. Might be something others are interested in trialling.

How was moving your Lr catalogue over? That is the one thing that has me hesitating on dropping Lr.

It was a few years ago now and I followed to the letter the then online procedure and everything from a backup drive transferred smoothly, and afaik was faultless as I didn’t find any errors. It took many many hours though, but there was a lot of photos and that might have been the reason for the time. 

At the time I remember there were comments online from those where it didn’t work smoothly. However, I had a dead pc, no working LR software and a backup LR catalogue. I was somewhat annoyed of what Adobe did preventing me transferring my LR software to a new computer, so I didn’t have anything to lose as I saw it and that made the decision easy for me to take the chance.

Would be worth checking out up to date comments on how the latest version handles LR transfers and/or contacting ON1 for their comments. 

Thanks for this! I have been dragging my heels for years, after brief trials of Affinity and Darktable, and was all set to just make the one-off £50ish purchase of Photoshop Elements (I think) which apparently is no longer an option. 
All I really need is to be able to quickly edit RAW files, I am not doing anything fancy with layers etc. Just the white balance and exposure changes available from RAW, and then basic levels / saturation. No issues with old LR catalogues etc as I never had it. Just folders full of RAW and jpg files sitting untouched and unloved on a Mac.

I'll trial this quickly tonight and if it doesn't frustrate me, I'll buy. 

I see ON 1 are putting up the price daily meantime albeit by pence each day in case anyone thinks I mistyped. This is not unusual for them though to change prices up and down throughout the year.

For others who are not interested meantime, it is usually cheaper towards the end of the current version year and after they announce a new version where you buy the current one and get a free update when the new one is released. Or that is how it has been in the past.

At first glance the software looks somewhat complicated, but in reality for basic stuff just choose to use certain features and ignore all the rest and that way it’s been fine for me. I only use a small fraction of what it is capable of.

There are many online help videos within ON 1 website itself which are useful and lots are free though many are require a one off price for a year’s access. There is also a very detailed online manual which is free if you need any guidance, and worth looking at.

Good luck with your trial. 

Cheers. It's a bit late at night to trial it now (I got distracted by a classic car exhibition and then piano practice).

Hopefully tomorrow, at the cost a few pence for dawdling. 
My old workflow was:

open the RAW. See what the auto does. 90% of the time it would get me 90% of the way there. Then tweak the levels, saturation and contrast quickly, and save as .jpg. 

That's all that I still need to do. White balance is mostly for the sake of concerts under tungsten lighting, the cameras do a decent job but some fine tuning helps. I don't really shoot many concerts now anyway, and since "losing" Photoshop, despite shooting in RAW, I've lazily(*) just chucked the jpgs into the Apple Photos thing which is more for phone photos, and do a quick edit there. Ironically, I used to do this all "properly" on a ratty old Macbook Pro I bought second hand in 2016. When that died in 2021 I bought a Mac M1 and a nice 28" monitor and have done no "proper" photo editing since! My (ahem, ahem) "serious" photography is on b&w 35mm film, hand processed and printed.

* lazy in terms of trialling and deciding on a replacement photo editor. Somehow I don't have the standard ones supplied by Canon and Sony, probably due to my cameras being second hand.