The On1 Problem

It’s true that most of the folks that commented on my On1 PhotoRAW review (from a few months ago) were in agreement with my findings, but there were a few who said I was wrong, was just being mean or, in a couple of cases, was in the employ of Adobe and being paid to rubbish the competition.

But I think that this post that I saw on one of the Facebook groups, perfectly encapsulates everything I was saying about this app and its overall design.

Here’s a guy that has bought the app and is trying to edit his shot. He has a RAW from a Mavic 4 Pro taken in portrait orientation. He does some very simple edits (midtones down, a bit of structure, slight negative dehaze). And the moment he goes into Edit mode, ON1 auto‑crops the file so that the entire bottom of the scene is chopped off.

Somewhat unbelievably, the solution is to rotate the file 90° in some other program first (e.g. Bridge), so ON1 sees it as ‘correct’ when it imports. Then, inside ON1, rotate again using its own Rotate tool so that both the canvas and the image get turned together and finally line up. In my review of the 2026 release of this app I pointed out how many of the basic functions (such as highlight or shadow recovery) were badly flawed, but it’s also full of ‘features’ like this.

When I point these things out I get told that On1 are a small independent company trying to compete with a massive international company like Adobe. And this is absolutely true and I would dearly love to support them in that regard, but I’m not about to give them a pass just because they’re an industry minnow. People are buying this software in the expectation that it will meet their post-processing needs and it’s up to On1 to meet those needs.

Doesn’t sound much like they’re going to have their house in order for the 2027 release.