On1 PhotoRaw 2025 First Impressions
I’m trialing On1 PhotoRaw 2025 as a possible non-subscription Lightroom replacement, but it’s not looking good. PhotoRaw isn’t as hideously clunky as Canon Digital Photo Professional, but it’s still far behind the state of the art. It has security issues, has much worse file and album management compared to Lightroom, and makes a lot of UI mistakes we should have put aside 40 years ago. Medium gray text on dark gray background? Seems On1 really doesn’t want people to read the labels, do they?
Here’s one mistake a lot of tools make, including PhotoRaw. Crops go from the edges and corners of the image rather than from the mouse cursor as they do in Lightroom. I want to click and expand the crop rectangle over the part of the image I’m selecting, not minimize a rectangle starting from an entire image. This is a violation of Fitts’ Law which competent UI designers have known about since the 1980s. There are five places on the screen that are fast to get to: left hand, right-hand, top, bottom, and where the cursor is now. Lightroom uses the fifth (where the mouse is now) for cropping. PhotoRaw uses none of these points. Instead you have to carefully position the mouse somewhere in the middle of the screen.
Another more minor problem are the presets. Lightroom has these too, but in Lightroom they’re just labels and are easily collapsed or hidden. PhotoRaw insists on cluttering my UI with distracting photographs I didn’t take and that have no relation to my work. If there’s a way to turn them off I haven’t found it yet.
Update: I did just find a mysterious icon in the lower left hand corner which lets me hide this sidebar completely. That helps, but it also hides things I need like the catalogs and when I do want to see the presets, I still don’t want to see random photos I didn’t take that I’m not working on. Text is good. Just show me the label.
But now we come to file management and imports. This is where PhotoRaw really starts to collapse. In Lightroom I import from a card, the photos go in my Pictures folder, the card is ejected, and I proceed to review and edit. Not so in PhotoRaw. By default PhotoRaw scan the entire filesystem looking for photos, a waste of time and CPU. An application should work on the files I give it, not go wandering around my hard drive. And in this case, when I tell it to import photos, it should copy the raw files into the Pictures folder (or another location I select) and do its raw developing. Instead it’s default is to process them on the SD card! This is so brain damaged I barely know where to begin. Instead of writing to the fast SSD, it wants to use super slow removable media? That is routinely reformatted with all work lost? PhotoRaw doesn’t seem to understand that it needs to treat removable photo media like SD cards differently than the Macbook’s own disks.
Suppose I do want to edit an already imported file elsewhere on the hard drive? There’s no standard File/Open command like every conformant Mac app has had since 1984. Instead I have to use Photoraw’s non-standard file browser hidden off in a sidebar. I can’t open a file. I can only browse a folder. To the extent I want to work on a single pre-existing file, it is nice that I can edit it where it already lives, rather than importing it into a catalog first, so +1 for that. However, is it really that hard to let me open it with File/Open like every other Mac app ever?
My goal is speed and productivity. I’m not a pixel peeper, and I’m not doing super intensive editing. I want to import, flag and rate, crop, do a few quick adjustments if needed on the photos I’ve selected, and then export; and I want to do this for a few hundred photos per session. So I’m not looking at masking, AI editing, or even denoising. I’m photographing for scientific purposes, not for contests or wall art. For this use case Lightroom is simply superior.
