With the recent announcement that certain Adobe cloud services will have a price increase in the near future, even more media creators are looking to jump ship to something different with similar features. Photographers who only rely on the Photography CC Plan consisting of Lightroom and Photoshop, are safe for now, but that hasn’t stopped many of the writers on SLR Lounge from converting their workflows over to Capture One and Affinity Photo. There are other Lightroom/Photoshop alternatives on the market for those looking for more/different including DXO Photolab, Phocus, and ON1; the latter of which just received an update to become even more enticing.

[REWIND: Adobe Announces Creative Cloud Price Increase]

Despite ON1’s better feature-set over Lightroom that includes layered local adjustments and advanced masking, one thing that the non-destructive editor lacked compared to its competitors was tethered support. With the new updated 2018.1 tethered shooting support for certain Nikon and Canon DSLRs was added. The first major update to Photo RAW 2018 also includes a plethora of other image quality enhancements, performance tweaks, and workflow optimization.

“Version 2018.1 isn’t just about the new features, although there are many powerful new additions. We’ve been very focused on image quality and the results customers get from using ON1 Photo RAW. Image quality and performance are the top priorities in every update, and we are very excited for our customers to experience these improvements for themselves in this update,” says Dan Harlacher, Director of Product at ON1.

New Improvements

  • Debayering – The algorithms have been improved to increase the amount of micro detail while reducing aliasing, yielding photos that are noticeably crisper with less color artifacts.
  • HDR – HDR alignment and deghosting have improved, yielding sharper results with less ghosting, noise, and color fringe. Users now have the ability to select which frame is used for deghosting and can also adjust the amount of motion visible in water and clouds.
  • Faster Cataloging – The thumbnail and preview generation of images is now faster. Searching photos has also been improved.
  • Noise Reduction – Improvements to reduce large noise from very high ISOs. Automatic hot-pixel removal has been added, and green and purple color aberration reduction has improved.
  • Sharpening – The sharpening algorithms have been improved to enhance micro details and provide sharper initial results.
  • Panorama – The panorama merge dialog now does a better job with vertical panoramas as well as really large ones. It can now stitch together up to 25 photos at a time. Blending of photos to compensate for differences in exposure and white balance have been improved.
  • Preview Quality – The preview window has been improved to more accurately reflect the details and sharpness in photos at different zoom levels.

New Features

  • Import – Get photos from your camera to your computer, choose where you want the photos to go, assign metadata, and more.
  • Tethered Shooting – Get your photos to your computer instantly and apply import settings. Currently supports Canon and Nikon.
  • Soft Proofing – Simulate what your photo will look like when it’s printed.
  • Metadata Templates – Add metadata to a group of photos using presets. This allows you to choose and save only the information you want applied to your photos.
  • Video Browsing & Organizing – Now supports viewing video files so you can organize those as well. Copy, move, name, add metadata, and more.
  • Custom Sorting – This option in Browse allows you to put your photos in any order you choose.
  • Batch Rename – Rename all of your photos in a batch to add unique information to filenames.
  • Edit Capture Date – Adjust date and time on your photos so they match the actual date and time they were taken.
  • Auto Advance – Automatically switch to the next photo during the culling process when rating or tagging photos.
  • Additional Camera & Lens Support — Added support for several new cameras and many new lenses.

ON1 Photo RAW 2018.1 is available now for an introductory price of $79.99 for a limited time, after which it goes up to $119.99, it can be downloaded here.