ON1 Releases Photo RAW 2017.1
ON1 officially released Photo RAW 2017.1 today, although software updates started trickling through over the past weekend. Here's the updates straight from ON1:
- NEW Color Film presets — These accurately reproduce the look of over 30 current and classic color slide and negative films
- Additional Skies — We’ve added a bunch of new skies to the backgrounds and textures libraries for replacing skies or simulating multiple-exposures.
- New Workspaces & Starting-Point Presets — For Develop, we have added two new categories of presets to help you configure the correct panes for different genres of photos.
- Faster, more accurate retouching and refine results — When you use the Perfect Eraser, Retouch Brush or Refine Brush we store and replay the results in a much faster way. This makes exporting faster, reloading faster and makes the previews in Browse consistent.
- Windows High-DPI support — We have added support for greater than 100% display scaling. ON1 Photo now looks much better on Windows tablets and 4K displays.
- Tell Which Photos Have Been Edited — Now photos that have been edited are identified with a badge in Browse. Also the reset items in the Settings menu are context-sensitive so you can see what kind of edits you have added to a photo.
- Reduced VRAM usage — We have dramatically reduced the amount of VRAM needed. This means older video cards will work better and you can open larger panorama photos now.
- Faster Browse — We have made a ton of improvements to performance in Browse. Scrolling is now smoother, Detail and Filmstrip view are faster, rolling down sub-folders is faster and we made improvements to performance for slow drives like NAS devices.
- NEW cameras — We have added support for: Canon PowerShot G9X Mark II, Fuji X-A3, Fuji X-T20, Fuji X100F, Panasonic DMC FZ80, Panasonic Lumix DC-FZ82, Panasonic LUMIX DMC GH5, Panasonic LUMIX DMC LC1, Panasonic Lumix GX850, Pentax K-P, FujiFilm GFX 50S, Sony A99 MKII, Nikon B700 (preliminary), Autel Cameras.
- Added support for HDR and Panorama DNG.
- Lots of additional bug fixes and performance improvements
So what are my favorite things in the 2017.1 release? I'm so glad you asked. :-)
My 5 Favorite Things in Photo RAW 2017.1
I love software updates, especially dot releases. I get new features to explore. They also usually mean squashed bugs and improved performance. Here's my favorites for ON1 Photo RAW 2017.1:
- Stability. That last bullet point is probably the most important in my view. Loads of bug fixes. That's welcome in any software update. And I know some of you had problems with earlier releases of Photo RAW. Grab the update. I've been running it for several days now and it is very stable.
- Retouching speed. Much, much improved. As a mirrorless shooter, sensor dust is a fact of life. I've opened up photos with a bunch of retouches have been applied, move into Develop or Effects and after one second or so, the retouches appear. No popup dialog, no progress bar. Just the retouches.
- Seeing what's been edited. Photo RAW 2017.1 introduces a new badge in Browse. If non-destructive adjustments in Develop or Effects have been applied, a small plus/minus badge is displayed in the lower right corner of the thumbnail. A feature request I'm going to pass along to the gang at ON1 is the ability to filter on this data. I think this feature can be further leveraged for a "show me what I haven't edited" view in a folder of images.
- Starting Points: Sometimes I have an image that I don't know what direction I want to take it in. That's when I turn to presets for a spark of inspiration. I like the addition of the Starting Points category. It reminds me of some of the "Magic" presets from a while back, but toned down some so they apply more generally to a wider range of images.
- More Skies: I've been known to replace a sky or two with my photos... or blend in one sky with another to add texture and depth to a scene. Having more to choose from is a bonus. I also like that many of the new skies are shot from a perspective that's more conducive to blending with an existing scene.
What... no color film, Scott? I followed that project over at the ON1 blog. It was really interesting to see how Dan and Jonny went from color photos to presets. However, I limited myself to 5 favorites. While I appreciate film, I don't have an abundance of nostalgia for it. I simply didn't shoot enough film "back in the day". That being said, I fully expect I'll be trying out some of those looks for some city scenes or personal photos. I have a couple of trips coming up over the next few months that will provide plenty of stock to try out these presets with.
I have yet to experiment with the HDR and panoramic DNG. I'm taking that to mean when one sends a few files from Browse over to Lightroom for an HDR merge or panorama stitch, the DNG that's returned is directly readable by Browse. If you've already tried this out, please let a comment below and let us know how it's working.