New Announcements from On1

Every autumn On1 releases a new version of its flagship PhotoRAW app and the plug-ins that are incorporated into it (and that are also sold separately as stand-alones), and early every summer it releases a substantive update to them.  PhotoRAW version 2023 follows the same pattern, and during the past several weeks On1 has been providing "sneak peeks" of what is to come.

Yesterday, for instance, I received an email announcing the release of On1 Resize AI 2023.5 whose most notable improvements are "the new revolutionary Face Recovery technology and the addition of the NoNoise AI technology for reducing artifacts when upscaling images."  Face recovery in particular has become a popular feature in resizing apps since Topaz Labs last year introduced it in an update to Gigapixel, and it's a gift to those photographers specializing in portraits.  

More important to me at least was the announcement in a Thursday email from On1 of improvements to PhotoRAW's Curves filter.  Ever since I first began with working with Adobe Photoshop in the early 1990's when it was still in version 3.0 I have always contended that the app's Curves tool was its most important feature for the control it gave the user over contrast and tonal values as well as individual color channels.  In a brief video that accompanied the recent email On1 outlined what promises to be a substantive upgrade to its own version of the tool.  While the histogram that now appears beneath the grid will be familiar to Photoshop users, other improvements are more unexpected.  For example, the filter interface now includes an eyedropper tool.  When using it, one has only to click anywhere in a given photograph to create a control point on the curve.  A cursor then appears in the photograph where the click was made which one can then move up or down to control the photo's relative brightness.  One can also now remove control points by right clicking on them, or one can alternatively enter input/output values manually.  These improvements can also be used on individual color channels in the same fashion.

At such time as I receive my free update to PhotoRAW I will begin working with the new features and post my findings here.