4/3/2020 ON1 Photo 10 10.5.2 Download Free
ON1 Photo 10 has steadily evolved from a suite of effects plug-ins into a serious all-in-one image browsing, editing and effects tool. But is it ready yet to rival Photoshop, Lightroom or any of the other big players?
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Well that depends on what you’re looking for, how you like to work and how much you’re prepared to adapt. I give it a cautious 4 stars.Update: What’s new in ON1 Photo 10.5?The changes in ON1 Photo 10.5 are relatively minor – the big change compared to previous versions came with version 10.0, which amalgamated a lot of filter effects which used to be separate, brought an updated interface, and came with a new name.
Download One1 Photo - A compact application that helps you create and edit layered images, and save the edited photos to JPEG, TIFF, PSD, or PSB file format.
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Previously, this suite use to be called Perfect Effects, but ON1 must have decided that the addition of photo browsing tools and its expansion into a wider image-editing role called for a name change too. The heart of the ON1 Photo 10 interface is this set of modules on the right hand side. You use these to browse your photos, enhance them, add effects, improve portraits, create layered composites and resize images for output.So version 10.5’s updates are much less ambitious, but interesting nonetheless. One of the strengths of this software is in the Effects module, where you can ‘stack’ and combine effects, masking each one separately as needed. In version 10.5, you only see a mask thumbnail for effects where a mask has been applied, so it’s easier to see at a glance where changes have been made.And if you’re a borders and textures fan – and this is one of ON1 Photo’s strong areas – you can now download and add more than 100 new ones from the ON1 website.ON1 has also improved its Perfect Brush masking tool. This was already pretty good, using the colour values under the brush cursor to automatically select around object outlines. The new version has Threshold and Transition sliders for fine-tuning the way in which tricky outlines like hair, fur and twigs are masked.
The Perfect Brush tool was pretty good already, it has to be said, so this could make it more useful still.Finally, ON1 Photo can now act as a host app for the Google Nik Collection plug-ins. This is a timely move from ON1, which may or may not have anticipated that these were about to become free. There is some crossover here, indeed some competition too – the Google Nik Collections cover a lot of the same territory as the ON1 Effects module – but it’s good that ON1 acknowledges that some users might want to use the Nik alternatives.This feature is almost but not quite sorted. You can send files straight to the Google Nik plug-ins straight from the ON1 Browse mode, but only if they’re in a format the Nik plug-ins support directly.
JPEGs and TIFFs are fine, but it doesn’t work with RAW files – you get an unsupported format message.It would be better if ON1 carried out a RAW conversion on-the-fly just like Lightroom, for example, because otherwise it feels like this feature only works with half your files. In fact, this kind of unexpected limitation or inconsistency does become a bit of a running theme with ON1 Photo 10.5. The Enhance module is OK for routine tone, colour and sharpness adjustments but it’s not particularly deep. Interface layout and workflowIf you use Photo 10.5 as a standalone app you’ve got a pretty clear workflow using a series of buttons down the right hand side of the screen.The top button opens the Browse module, which offers pretty fast folder browsing with the added bonus of Albums and Smart Albums. So on one level it works like Adobe Bridge, simply showing you the contents of your image folders, but it goes a step further by allowing you to create ‘virtual’ collections of images in Albums, without actually changing their location your hard disks.There’s more. You can also create Smart Albums which act like saved searches, displaying all the photos you took with a particular camera, ones where you’ve used a particular keyword and so on.
These aren’t quite as straightforward as they seem, though, because you can only use Smart Albums for images you’ve added to the Browse module’s ‘Favorites’ – these are folders it scans continually for changes and additions.It should be straightforward enough to add a folder containing lots of sub-folders and then have all the photos in this folder tree appear in one long list and not just see a list of folder names – the online help shows a button for this. However, this button did not appear consistently in either v10.0 or the newer v10.5 (tested on two separate Macs), and there seems to be no reference to this online.The button appeared if there were a small number of sub-folders and only one level of hierarchy, but did not appear if there were a couple of dozen sub-folders, say, so it was no good trying to view the contents of an entire image archive, or a year’s worth of images at once.This did badly compromise the Browse module’s usefulness and in particular its Smart Albums. This is useful: you can click this Show Sub-Folder Contents button to show all the pictures in a nested group of folders Except that here it’s disappeared.
It doesn’t seem to like too many folders at a time (or maybe too deep a hierarchy).From the Browse module you can open up images in one of the three editing modes in the next section: Enhance, Effects or Portrait.The Enhance module offers a small selection of preset adjustments and enhancements in a panel on the left, but it’s more likely you’ll enhance images manually using the tools on the right. There’s a selection of Quick Fixes for Exposure, Contrast, Color and the like, and below this is a Color & Tone Adjustments panel with sliders for Exposure, Contrast, Shadows, Highlights, Whites, Blacks, Detail and, below this, adjustments for Temperature, Tint, Saturation and Vibrance.
Underneath are panels for Vignette effects (does that really have a place here?), Sharpening and Noise Reduction.This is a pretty modest collection of tools, without even Curves adjustments, so while you might use it for quick and straightforward images fixes or a little preparatory work ahead of applying any effects, that’s about as far as it goes. One thing I discovered is they used to offer top notch support. If you had a problem you could call them up and they could help identify what the problem was and how to solve it. Now they merely send a link and I can’t figure out what I am doing wrong.
From a world class product support to the most frustrating support I ever experienced. Raw seems to have allot of potential if it works and if it is properly supported. I get a free upgrade to raw when I purchased On1 10.5 so I will see if that is worth my time. After that I think I will be looking at other third party plugins like Topaz.
I use Google Nik the most and highly recommend it. It is offered free from time to time so check that out.–. Yeah, I can relate to the “clunky” characterization but I found v.
10 a bit of an improvement, and better (imho) than the initial On1 Photo Raw release. I’m staying with it for familiarization in parallel to Lightroom which, at version 6.9 standalone, still offers for me the most refined combination of features I tend to use.
Thanks for the response. There’s a nearly dizzying range of options out there. I see On1’s been manically racing to catch up to Photo Raw’s prodigious hype. If they manage to do that, the product could be worth at least a little trial time, and I look forward to your observations.DJB.
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