Upgrading to On1 2021 versus LR subscription
Sorry, I thought someone posted on this topic recently but I can't find it. Anyway, I think they were saying that the On1 upgrade was almost as expensive as the annual subscription charged by Adobe.
That was certainly not my experience. Adobe forced me to pay the UK price for its subscription, since I think it linked somehow or other to my UK Apple ID (even though I don't live in the UK any more). The last time I renewed in July last year I paid £120 for a year. I think the US price was $120 (about £96 at that time, so a bit more than the 20% VAT charged in the UK).
I have just upgraded to On1 2021 and It wasn't obligatory. I got the early bird discount plus an extra affiliate discount and I was able to charge it in Mexican pesos, since that's where I live. My no-fee UK card charge came to just under £53 (about $69USD). So less than half what I would have been paying if I was still a LR subscriber.
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I also made a similar comment Ray. It's not even six months since my ON1 PR purchase and therefore it is more expensive than a full year of the LR subscription for me. My upgrade cost to 2021, after the discount is applied, is still around 1.5 times the yearly cost for the Adobe subscription.
Just my own thoughts...I would rather get a stable release of 2020 with all the bugs fixed, regardless of who reported those (not just the ones I reported), than to get more "features".
As for Adobe, you can always create a new ID like with any other such and pay in the currency you want. For example, I have 2 Apple IDs (not Adobe) for different countries rather than to keep switching the country.
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It's good to hear that someone has had a good experience for a change.
Yes, many people complain that the cost of On1 upgrades every year is about the same as a subscription and that's making On1 seem like not such a good deal.
What they're forgetting is that cost is not the only factor. You don't HAVE to upgrade every year the way you do with a subscription and if you choose to skip a year or even never upgrade again, unlike a subscription, the program that you still have is yours and will keep working forever.
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Agree with you Rick excepting that you need to have a stable version which can be used almost forever and never upgrade. Personally, I would purchase a permanent license for LR if that was an option since it works for me. I do not require or need anything else (feature-wise) that it has even the earlier release 8. I have Affinity Photo and it does all the editing I want. No PS required.
Unfortunately, the older LR cannot deal with my newer camera raw files, so, that is one basic issue. At the same time, I do not see myself changing my current cameras in the near future (maybe not even in the long term).
Not being a professional photographer, I would prefer to have something stable that I do not need to struggle with and spend more time than required otherwise. This is also the reason why I am not keen on any new "features", LR or ON1.
Overall, it boils down to a usable release. The others, including ON1, force you to upgrade even for bug fixes instead of releasing a stable version which fixes all known bugs or at least most of those.
Had it not been for the pandemic and lockdown, I would probably not have spent time looking for an alternate to LR. I guess we all learn new stuff at times :)
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Rick I agree. I dithered over upgrading at this stage as On1 2020 works pretty well for me, but I have enough money now I have cancelled three intercontinental trips this year, so I thought what the heck. Plus I have Apple shares purchased almost 20 years ago haha!
On1 2020 may not work for ever: an upgrade to the OS might put paid to that.
Nitin, I would like to see your maths. Anyway, I have no desire to hand over money to Adobe, which is possibly one of the richest and greediest international companies in the world. On1 is at least a small company run by enthusiasts and they often get squeezed out by the big boys. (But then I am the kind of person that likes to shop in my local family run stores than a big supermarket)
Plus factors for On1 for me. Very similar interface to LR so easy to learn. Excellent online tutorials and webcasts. The features that are more akin to PS are way easier to master. I found the PS leaning curve nigh impossible. But I am only a hobby photographer.
Major downsides to On1. The LR import tool didn't work at all well and I spent a lot of time in On1 going through photos individually and re-editing them. But that did improve some of my editing skills. On1 is definitely slower and I did lose some sidecar edits when I moved folders from my external SSD when I got a new higher end MacBook Pro. I have never experienced any of the bugs that seem to bug Nitin.
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The math, Ray Miles, is as follows...
Upgrade cost with the current user applied is 11.5k INR (approx).
Yearly subscription for LR (PS as well) is 8.5k INR (approx).
Yes, the overall UI and feature set that ON1 has is very good and that is also the reason I spent so much time and effort to help in trying to improve it by reporting bugs along with videos to demonstrate those. I also understand the fact that support cannot do much with that and it goes to the dev team. Then, we have no information on that excepting new features and a new release which costs more than a year of the Adobe subscription (to me).
I did not mind the time I spent experimenting since I was also re-organising my collection and have multiple backups in case something went wrong.
Lastly, I will check out 2021 as and when it is released and if even half the bugs I have reported are fixed, I will upgrade. Ideally, I would want to discard LR+PS and move to ON1+Affinity. Let's see...
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Hi Nitin. Your LR price is pretty good, but no doubt Adobe have a base in Gurgaon or somewhere like it and that enables them to keep the price in line with other countries.
On the other hand, what On1 wants from you seems outrageous. I don't know if this will work for you, but can you switch currencies for payment? I know this was possible for me, since my initial quote for the upgrade was in MXN but I switched to GBP to see if it might be cheaper. It wasn't, due to the 20% VAT!
Did you also find an affiliate ID? That saved me an additional 15%. Otherwise, yes, 11.5kI NR (approx $150USD) seems outrageous. My sympathies. Maybe you have a friend outside India who could purchase it for you?
I am kind of assuming you are on a PC, of which there are many shapes, sizes and configurations, and that seems to be a nightmare for developers. As a Topaz beta tester of recent stats I can see every single tester seems to have different bugs or things that don't work each time. anew beta is released. Much depends on the individual GPU I think. On1 is not alone in this business of charging people for new release that many or not deal with the bugs in the current on. Just look on the Topaz and Luminar forums for very similar complaints to yours.
PS. I miss India a lot. I should;d have been in Pakistan (Hindu Kush) right now and am still hoping to get back to India before too long. I have been going since 1977.
My slideshow of the last trip (photos edited in On1 an slideshow created with FotoMagico 5):
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I switched to Macs only when they moved to Intel chips Ray Miles. This allows me to do my dev work across platforms on a single system...Okay, multiple systems, but, all Macs.
Very nice slideshow. I would say you have seen more of India than I have :)
Drop-in a line when you are in India. I am located in New Delhi.
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Thanks for the kind words.
I know you have posted about the bugs. Since they are Mac related, I'd like to see if I can replicate them. Can you point me to the posts and/or videos? Thanks a lot.
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I have removed the videos and the sample files from my share, but, I can outline some...
1. Check out the crop/canvas values. They are non-integer values which is not possible. Just try to crop any image and see. Also, you cannot see the crop values unless you go back into crop after cropping. Only in free mode are the values updated, but, if you use shift to constrain, that is no longer updated.
2. Application state is not saved on shutdown. There are quite a few elements that are not saved including some of the settings in the preferences including the ability to turn of .on1 files. This, in turn, implies major fundamental issues.
3. There was a mention of licensing being machine based, which is not quite correct. User accounts will require a login. I was making some videos on ON1 and I used a fresh account to show how to setup the initial starting point and discovered this one.
4. Search is persistent with the last term used even when you don't see it anywhere in 2020.5.x. This was okay in 2020.1
5. Masks in filters are not saved in presets w/o a work-around. Again, points to some basic flaws.
6. Looks at filename extensions instead of reading file headers (18th century kind of stuff).
7. Does not log corrupt or unsupported files. If you are coming from any other application, you will not even know which files are missing. Also works only with RGB spaces.
8. Does not display the correct number of total images.
9. Rendering issues in the red colourspace for quite a few Nikon raw files (across 4 camera bodies).
10. Catalogs and Edits vanish as you might have seen in the forums here. For the catalog, just edit any file and it will come back.
11. Race conditions in the preview threads that cause crashes and freezes. Most noticeable on a fresh install and if you have more than about 20k images.
Think I will stop here for now...There is more :)
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Nitin, I am not sure I understand all your concerns, but I can address some of them.
1. No idea what is meant by non-integer values. However, you are right that using shift to constrain will update the values. However, worse in my view, is that once an image has been cropped it still shows its original pixel dimensions in the Info panel on the right rather than the cropped ones. Maybe this will change with the new Crop AI tool in 2021, but it should be fixed here too.
2. Correct. I turned off the sidecar option box, then closed the app. When I re-opened it, the box was ticked again.
3. Not sure about this one. I think the software checks your licence every time you open it when connected to the internet. But I recall there is something you can do, to ensure the app will open when you aren't connected. I think Brian and Rick know the answer to that one. Anyway I opened and closed the app maybe half a dozen times with the internet off, and there was no issue.
4. Don't understand this one. I used advance search to look for someone by name in all my catalogued folders. Many of these were carry-overs from LR face recognition. I then closed the app and when I reopened it I was in the folder I had previously been looking prior to the search.
5. Not something I have tried or feel I need so can't comment
6. Don't understand that one.
7. I had some issues with On1 when I started using it, sent some logs to support and they identified several corrupted files that were causing issues. The files were unreadable in LR (which I still had at the time) as well.
8. I opened three folders at random, and in all three the number of images listed in On1 matched those when I looked at the folders in Finder.
9. Not a Nikon user so can't comment.
10. Yes that happened to me and I agree it has been a major issue for many people. Support do not seem to have sorted it as yet and for the time being I don't intend to move any more photo folders between drives.
11. I do find On1 crashes from time to time whenI try to open an old JPG and all I get is the circle with the strike-through. I have not tried changing the GPU Render in Preferences, since I haven't yet looked up what that's supposed to do.
I am going to report my findings from 1 and 2 to Support.
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1) By non-integer values he means it shows 123.45 for a dimension in pixels. You can't have .45 pixels. This is a niggling thing that has absolutely no affect on the program's performance. All you have to do is ignore the decimal portion and you know what the dimensions will be. Yes, it is easy to fix by simply rounding down the decimal value in the display the same way the program does when the crop is actually applied. As for the Info panel, that shows information about the actual image that was captured. I don't think it is a bug but I too would like to see the cropped dimensions there. Maybe putting those in parenthesis after the full image size would work?
2) This is a known problem. We'll have to wait to see if it gets fixed for the next update. I'm betting it will be.
3) Your license allows the program to be installed on up to 5 computers. That has nothing to do with signing in and being able to run the program. The company does have a way for users without consistent internet (on a safari perhaps?) to obtain a file that the program recognizes in place of the internet query. All you have to do is write support and ask. https://on1help.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019630292-Offline-Activation-ON1-Photo-RAW-2019-
4) I don't understand this one either. Every time I turn off the Advanced Search panel all my previous search criteria are cleared.
5) I don't have any problems with this one either. I have a preset I use all the time which has 2 Local Adjustments each with a Luminosity Mask, one inverted so I have control over shadows separately from highlights.
6) I do understand this one and it is one of those cases where the program isn't working as desired but it is working as designed. That means it isn't a bug to be fixed. Instead, one has to argue their case for why it should be changed. This is something I've been able to do with support upon occasion too. You have to be persuasive and present reasoned arguments why the suggested change is a better.
7) Working with only RGB files is once again a design decision. It is not a bug that a program which is designed to edit RAW files does not support other colorspaces since photographs are always in the RGB space when they are captured. It isn't that difficult to change an image's colorspace if needed. Also, the program does log corrupt files. There is are 2 log files called CorruptFiles.log & LastRunCorruptFiles.log.
8) The count displayed reflect the number of items in the current Browser view. I'm currently viewing a folder with 3 folders and 11 images. The count accurately reflects 14 items. This field is not mentioned anywhere in the User Guide so I don't know why one would think it represents only photos.
9) I can't comment on this either but I would suspect that if support was given raw files with the edits that illustrate the problem in a reproducible manner it would get passed to the engineers.
10) Agreed this is a problem. However, since I do alpha testing I can't say where the problem is coming from.
11) I too get the occasional crash. I don't know anything about race conditions and I don't know how these are being identified without the developer tools to look for them.
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Brian Lawson, you tested and reported #6 as well :)
Also shared the search issue here sometime...Simple to reproduce. For a simple test, just type any search term that does not exist (zzzzz for example). There would be no results. So far so good. Now, change over to any other folder and you will still not see any results despite the fact that you see nothing in the search since the text is reset, but, the search persists.
There is a related bug as well. Just clicking advanced search when you have all catalog as a criteria changes what you see w/o doing anything else.
Oh well...Will recheck and consolidate all this once 2021 is out and see...
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Nitin, converting the prices you gave to Australian dollars I wonder if the price you have quoted is for On1 with a year's membership of the On1 Plus education etc package - the conversion ends up around the price I am quoted for this. Just the software upgrade is around 75 AUD cheaper.
My last LR+PS annual subscription was about 175 AUD and I am being quoted around 125 AUD for upgrade of On1, so at least here in Australia the On1 software is nowhere near 1.5 times the price of LR+PS.
With On1 publishing regular videos on Youtube then no need for Plus membership to get support in using the basic software.
I accept that there are problems with On1 but recently I have had more crashes with Photoshop and Topaz than I have with On1, on Mac, and am getting good performance.
Like the other recent responses I am not sure that some of the items you have listed are bugs but rather misunderstandings or hitting things that are "broken as designed".
Why do you need a work round to save filter/adjustment masks in Effects or Local Adjustments, there is an option to do this in the save dialogue? Or are you wanting to save masks on just some of the filters?
As Brian has pointed out the count is of objects and includes folders as well as images and versions. If you want a count of images then can filter to select only images and versions. I have tested this with my nearly 30000 catalogued images in 224 folders and the item count went down by the number of folders when I applied this filter to all catalogued files.
I spent some of my lockdown time tidying my images up and sorting out the results of having 20 years worth of digital images. In doing this I found that some of the issues I was having with On1 were actually due to things that had happened in the past. For example keywords appearing out of hierarchy which I believed to be an On1 issue actually came from Tiffs I had managed to export from Lightroom without including the Lightroom hierarchy.
Having done all this I have had very few problems running On1.
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Happy ON1 works for you David Tillett, I hope the next release does the same for me :)
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Richard B., everyone else would be ecstatic if that happens! :)
But...There is always that...Even if all the earlier stuff is fixed, I have some more that I have not bothered to report so far...Maybe I will share the related files and videos here as well so everyone can try out the same :)
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It is very difficult to compare pricing for Adobe products, with pricing for ON1, or anyone else's products for that matter.
But, if you buy any software to be used in the UK, you will have to pay Value Added Tax (VAT) which is rather like sales tax. (It is believed that the UK Government raises more in VAT, than it does in Income Tax. Especially as VAT is often a 'tax on top of a tax'. i.e. we pay heavy duties on petrol and diesel at the fuel pumps, then get charged VAT as well. Such that almost 80% of the price at the pump is UK tax).
But also, Adobe has lots of 'discounts' and 'special introductory' prices, whereas ON1 tends not to. So, I regularly hear complaints from Adobe Users who bought a subscription at one price, then find that they are locked into a higher than expected price later on, when their discount ends.
I could perhaps save a few pence by switching to Adobe's Products, but the potential savings are so marginal, as to be effectively pointless.0 -
Agree with you David Price, no real point switching from anything that works for you. In my case, ON1 looked good enough so I would never have to use PS or Affinity for my purposes. Still have hope for 2021...
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David, I agree about special offers, but I got On1 2020, Luminar 4 and Topaz DeNoise all for less than my LR subscription. Plus Adobe don't give rebates if you pay annually and cancel before renewal date.There were offers on all of them, plus an affiliate discount on top of that. I shall not be upgrading Luminar 4, since I really only use it for sky replacement, but will do so this time with On1. Luckily I am now a beta tester for Topaz, so get to use all their products. I find DeNoise and Sharpen pretty essential! Re VAT, I have been lucky for years as an expat in being able to get VAT refunds. I was planning to buy the new Sigma telephoto lens for my Sony camera this month, but of course can't get to the UK. By the time I do, the VAT refund scheme for visitors will have been withdrawn. Shame, but fair enough really.
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I got Luminar 4 as well Ray Miles and am not upgrading that since there is no progress on the DAM side. The existing version works fine for what it does and the portrait mode is a lot better than the ON1 Portrait AI IMO. Was really tempted to get Topaz stuff, but, I don't shoot in low light that goes beyond my camera sensor and my acceptance (of IQ) range. One of my friends got the entire Topaz suite and I am kinda tempted to get the Mask AI since it does what I mostly use PS or Affinity for. If ON1 2021 works for me, then, Topaz is out, otherwise, I will probably get the Mask AI.
Expecting my new iMac in the next couple of days and hopefully, by then, Big Sur and a bunch of updates will also roll in. Wanted to get a known and functional system before Apple changes the processor...Yes, long hours of work coming in a few days :)
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Forgot to add...I came across the mask not being saved bug in ON1 when I was making a set of presets for sky replacements. It is simple to replace skies in ON1, unfortunately, the mask in effects is not saved w/o a work-around and I did not want to share those presets and start getting queries on why people could not save their own presets.
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Richard B., I am a perpetual student and a teacher...A veteran at both... :P
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I'm not convinced that the Mask not saving in Presets is actually a bug. I think that the more correct description is a design decision. Because a preset is created to apply to a whole range of sometimes very different images. So, each effect layer in a preset is given a neutral mask, when the preset is saved in ON1. The same happens with local adjustments.
I think that the Designers/Coders Logic is that as masking should be image specific, the mask from a previous image is unlikely to fit any new images, to which the preset will be applied. So, they don't copy the mask. They do save all of the other settings, such as blend mode, opacity, etc.
I did have some similar images of workers in an iron foundry. When I synced the images, I had to go through and readjust all of the masks. But, I would have had to do so anyway. Because I had to shoot hand held, (tripods rightly not allowed, ( in the dim lighting they would have been a trip hazard for the other people)), so all of the things that needed to be masked were in slightly different positions in each of the images.
However, I very much agree that all people should aim to be students, and to have open minds, throughout their lives. There is so much that we have to learn in this world.And Ray, before you come home. Note that the UK Government is currently running up enormous debts. And we all know what that will mean in terms of tax.
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It is a bug David Price and ON1 has options for the same. Like I mentioned earlier, it is possible to save with a work-around. Might be an idea to read it and masks are not physical drawings and yes, the masks I am talking about apply across images regardless, but, I am not going to explain or expand on that here.
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I have to wonder if the term Preset is being confused for Style. A Style is a 'preset' that can be applied only after adding an Effect or a Local Adjustment and is set with the More menu in the Effect/LA's panel. A Preset can contain multiple Effects and Local Adjustments. When you apply a Preset to an image the E/LA layers are added for you.
As I mentioned above, I use masks in Presets all the time. I also have my own Styles; for instance, I have Local Adjustment Styles for burning or dodging. I certainly wouldn't want the burning I did to one image to be applied to a different image.
I agree with David, this is a design decision, not a bug. The fact that you've found a way to work around the limitation of not saving masks with Styles does not mean you've found a bug. It means exactly that, you found a way to get around the design limitation.
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Just out of interest which other applications can save any form of mask for a local adjustment/filter?
I have just done some quick tests
- can't see a way to do this in Lightroom, creating a local adjustment preset only saves the slider values
- DxO Photolab 3 didn't save a control point when I saved a preset
- Luminar 4 did not include mask when I saved a look
I am still trying to learn Photoshop but while it has presets for brushes, gradients etc I haven't seen a way to save anything like a stylised look that sets up adjustment layers etc, so can't even see if a mask can be saved in Photoshop.
At least On1 does allow masks to be saved in a way that works for many people, I too have saved presets with Luminosity masks which have adjusted to the image that the preset I have applied them to, well enough for my purpose.
So I accept that On1 is not saving masks in the way that you would like them included in presets for your images but what it does offer is better than the nothing that several other popular applications offer.
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You can save the masks in Topaz Mask AI and send them direct to Photoshop. During beta testing of the former, I worked out a way to send them to On1, but can't remember offhand how I did it. It wasn't difficult though. Annoyingly, you can't import them to other Topaz products at present. This has not been an issue for me, since Sharpen AI has its own masking tool that serves me well enough when I am trying to improve a wildlife shot taken on a long lens with my unsteady old hands!
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Only straight gradient, colour and luminosity masks make practical sense as presets (and perhaps some more). The issue with ON1 is that it is inconsistent...Saves these masks in some places and does not in others. The behaviour, although still inconsistent, varies in 2020.1 vs 2020.5x. Even a simple copy and rename of a preset in ON1 is buggy. This also became apparent while I was creating sky replacement presets for ON1. This is a minor niggle, so, ignored for now.
PS can save and apply a lot of stuff...It also has actions which can really do a lot of automation for quite a few purposes.
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How do you copy and rename a preset?
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