Inside Photo RAW 2021 it looks as if your images have been edited, but to produce an image with those processing changes permanently applied you have to export a new, processed image. This means that it doesn’t change your original photos, but stores your adjustments as processing ‘metadata’ (or processing instructions) alongside your photos.
One of the key points about Photo RAW 2021, like the preceding versions, is that its adjustments are ‘non-destructive’. This only works on folders added to the Catalog, though, and ‘grouping’ images means moving them to a separate sub-folder – and not everyone likes messing with their carefully constructed folder systems. ON1 Photo RAW 2021 can browse folders and build thumbnails very quickly, and if you’re happy with a simple but flexible folder-based system and modest cataloguing tools – as opposed to the full-blown database image management in Capture One and Lightroom – this is fine.Ī new Smart Organize tool in this 2021 edition is designed to help you find and eliminate duplicate images, and to help you group images together that were taken at the same location or the same time, or even have the same appearance. Otherwise, the organising tools are fine. It’s a similar principle technically, but very different in usability terms. You can still create and save custom search presets, which do a similar job, but these are buried in the Advanced Search panel, and can only be displayed as a linear list via a drop-down menu. Why take smart albums away? It’s hard to imagine there is a technical reason. These have been removed, so now all you have is static albums where you add images manually. Smart albums bring together images with matching shooting information, keywords, ratings or other properties you choose. This feature was last seen in ON1 Photo RAW 2019.
They are confusingly similar, but it’s only in the Catalog tab that you get the full set of organisational tools.īut ON1 does not have smart album feature for catalogs. ON1 Photo RAW 2021 continues to distinguish between ‘My Catalogs’ and ‘Browse’ modes. That’s not a bad idea because there has always been some potentially confusing overlap here – even with folders, you can still do some handy filtering and sorting. In the 2021 version, these have been separated into two different tabs. Catalogs have a couple of advantages – you can select which folders are included, whereas the browse window includes your whole computer and connected drives, and catalogs offer more advanced search tools. You can browse them folder by folder or you can add them to a catalog. ON1 Photo RAW 2021 offers two ways of organising your photos.
ON1 Photo RAW does also offer Smugmug integration, but for this you need to be an ON1 Plus member, which means – again – a subscription. For that you need to swap to a subscription plan, so ON1 is another company edging towards subscription models – or at least offering them as an alternative. That is still true, unless you want Adobe style cloud storage and sync options. For a long time, a major selling point of ON1 Photo RAW is that it is subscription free.
It even has a very effective Portrait AI module, shown here. ON1 Photo RAW 2021 has RAW develop tools, a wide variety of Effects, the ability to merge panoramas and HDR stacks, and supports for layers, blend modes and masks.
ON1 also offers an online cloud sync service in a couple of different storage tiers and synchronisation with the ON1 mobile app and, with ON1 Photo RAW 2021, the ability to sync presets and other ON1 assets like brushes and textures.