ON1 Photo Raw 2024 Review : First thoughts and Brilliance AI

[@STACYBURK]

I've ran over 100 images through the Brilliance AI and it's made almost 100% of them look much worse and caused more time in corrections than if I left Brilliance AI off and edited them my self from scratch. I'm a professional wedding photographer and I use off camera lighting. So I correctly light my couples and purposely cause shadows where I want them. From what I'm seeing, Brilliance AI wants to remove my purposed shadows by brightening them and also over brightens what I have perfectly exposed with my couples. The result is a flat image with way over exposed couples. It's also making my couples faces look flat by removing the nice contrast created by the directional lighting. Maybe Brilliance AI only works on images without the use of off camera lighting. I don't know. But so far, I'm disappointed. I was hoping this would really help me save time in editing, but that's not the case.

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Hi Stacy, sorry to hear you haven't had good results with Brilliance AI, I guess it's not for everyone and every style of editing. Have you gone into the local adjustments and dialled them back a bit, or adjusted the master slider. By the sounds of things it's doing a lot of work to your shots when you only need minimal edits. That was the beta version I was using and across a large batch of images that needed some work it did wonders. If you are completely controlling the light then it's not going to be of much use to you I am guessing. When this tool is refined in future updates I am guessing that is going to be worked on a lot more.

[@STACYBURK]

I went into the Preferences and tried some different adjustments. But it still just ends up being too much work to correct all the over adjusting that the Brilliance AI does. The only thing I've found that helps get my photos to a pretty good starting point is the Auto button in Lightroom. If I could show you the before and after results of what Brilliance AI does to my raw images, you would probably laugh. Yeah, it's that bad. @@kieranhayesphotography

[@xFreyelis]

Exactly. This Editor makes everything look "HDR", which isn't good for a lot of styles, maybe only when you want Bright and Airy, it may work. But other than that, it isn't really "AI", as it is doing mostly adjustments based on the shadow and highlight read-out, then making them HDR-wise.

[@douglasritchie2836]

This looks brilliant, Kieran, I have 2023 but this looks next level, hope you are still loving the Z8, grabbed the Smallrig L bracket you showed and it works very well.

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Hi Douglas, Ah it's a really nice bit of software and it is going to really help streamline editing thankfully. Still loving the Z8 using it every day now and it's awesome. In fairness for the price that SmallRig L bracket is amazing value for money. I haven't been very active on KZbin just been way too busy with shoots and editing etc... I hope to get back to it now again and get around to posting more frequently again. So fngers crossed you will be seeing more of me on here again.

[@roymedina638]

I’ve been an On1 user for many years and when I saw the promo videos featuring the new Brilliance AI feature, I was blown away and instantly pre-purchased the upgrade! I now have my own copy and I can’t help but feel terribly disappointed in the results I’ve seen. Using Brilliance AI gives me horrible color casts, usually way too red or magenta in my skin tones. I know people will say that I can set WB to as shot instead of Auto, but my question would be, why isn’t BAI smart enough to automatically fix a color cast instead of giving me something way too extreme? I shouldn’t have to fix stuff that it’s butchered right? Yeah, I’ve also heard people say, if you’re not happy with BAI’s results, then you can just turn it off. Well, as I stated, the whole reason I purchased this was because of the hype over Brilliance AI! My understanding is that it’ll improve my photos to the point that I can then refine it to my own taste, not spending extra time trying to get it back to a reasonable baseline. That defeats the expectation and promise that this product will speed up my workflow.

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Hi Roy, so sorry to hear you have been having issues with B AI, can I ask what camera and file format are you using and are you on Mac or windows? This was the beta version I was testing and tbh it worked well for me anytime I tried it. I am just wondering if you hit a bug and did you report it? There could very well be a fix coming soon. Also don't forget you can get a refund if it just doesn't work for you.

[@roymedina638]

@@kieranhayesphotography thanks Kieran! I am shooting in raw on a Sony A9ii and working in Win10. I also use Exposure X6 to process my photos and the results are great. I was just hoping On1 would help streamline my process and not hinder it. I’ll try contacting them and see what they say. Again, thanks for your reply.

[@kieranhayesphotography]

@@roymedina638 Well in fairness it should help and if it ain't doing that it's not a lot of good to you. I would definitely reach out to them and they will probably ask for a sample shot they are generally very good and fast to reply, but after a major launch things can be a bit slower. Please do let me know how you get on.

[@Zebrajellyfishphoto]

Great video BUT I have a specific need as far as batching goes. I will normally shoot an event in low light (thus high ISO) with no flash. I was glad to hear ON1 can be set to recognize ISO levels. That's really cool. I have been using Luminar AI a few years now and can batch dozens or hundreds of photos with adjustments for light, contrast, highlights, shadows, noise reduction AND the software will see faces and brighten those so one or more faces are all properly lit in each photo. Will ON1 see faces too? Will ON1 auto adjust faces, one or more in any given photo with all the other adjustments it automatically makes? Finally, will ON1 export to a JPG on any side I prefer?

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Hi, firstly I have to say I have been up the walls with shoots over the last few days so I haven't had enough time to properly test the final version as of yet. This was the beta version I was testing. No issue exporting to Jpeg in different sizes, yes it will see large faces in the photos (I haven't tested multiple faces yet). I will get around to that this week though. I also work with SKYLUM aswell as a few other software companies, I just feel Brilliance AI could be a serious step forward. Is it there yet? I am not sure but the fact it's only going to get better now is huge.

[@Zebrajellyfishphoto]

Thank you! I understand this is a lot of work and I appreciate all you do. I want to give you an update. I downloaded ON1 2024 and immediately went to a folder with 36 RAW photos from an outdoor headshot session (ISO 160-400). I edited one of the photos, saved the adjustments as a preset, added it to a preset category (Headshots) then went back to the browser, selected all the photos in that folder and applied the preset I created and in a moment or two ON1 crashed. I sent a report and reopened ON1 and it appears all the adjustments were applied to that folder. I'm next going to do the same to a shoot from an indoor event with low lighting where I didn't use a flash (thus high ISO averaging 12K or so) and report the results. @@kieranhayesphotography

[@kieranhayesphotography]

@@Zebrajellyfishphoto thanks a million for the update. I always expect a few bugs at the start so the odd crash can be expected in my mind. Should be resolved in the next update though. Very interested to hear how you get on with the High ISO shots and batch processing the NR, so please do keep me updated. I was going to have a good play with it today but I decided to go out and take some seascape shots instead. The fresh air was badly needed 😃 It was either that or do a review on new strobe 😃 I made the right choice I think.

[@Zebrajellyfishphoto]

@@kieranhayesphotography my pleasure. Glad you got out today. I've stayed in too long myself and will get out, albeit late. On the topic of my event photos (high ISO shots), I started creating adjustments to eventually save as a preset and came across one issue, that being the setting to adjust brightness of faces - in a group of 3 - the adjustment only adjusted brightness for one of the 3 faces. I'm not sure how to make it adjust brightness of all three faces. This is key to my batch processing. Also the reason I like Luminar AI still at this point (Skylum is more focused on Luminar NEO and it's slow). Overall though, the adjustments to the very yellow, high ISO shots so far looks really good, and noise reduction looks clean.

[@Zebrajellyfishphoto]

I'm done with ON1. I appreciate you hearing my experience but finding the advertising doesn't match the product is both frustrating and disappointing especially since I believe they are not being honest with folks. ON1 claims the speed improvement is significant and I'm on a pretty clean MacBook Pro with the M2 Max chipset and it lags quite a bit when opening a folder or selecting one photo to work on. As a matter of fact after opening the software, it by default opens the last folder I've been in and I double click a photo from the browser view and it can take 5-10 seconds for that photo to open and then another 15 seconds before I can start making adjustments to that photo. I've done this 5 times now, opening and closing the software but the results are always consistently slow. Speaking of features and my experience thus far, I am a little disappointed in the face detection as any batch processing would not work if I wanted to use the software's face detection feature to brighten the faces of more than one person. Right now it only adjusts (brightens) one face out of many and if needing more than one face brightened would have to be done manually - again defeating the Batch Processing feature in applying Presets to any number of photos. There's an option in Preferences under the Brilliance AI tab to adjust for the "Most Prominent" face, which is useless if needing all faces in a shot to be brightened. I often look into or buy software like ON1 or Luminar AI/Luminar Neo only to realize for the most part that sticking with Adobe is my best bet. I appreciate what these other developers are attempting but they are behind in technology and money of course in doing what they advertise and I'm tired of being an an unwitting beta tester. You on the other hand do great work! Thank you.@@kieranhayesphotography

[@martinlennon4673]

Brilliance AI looks the business … think I’ll upgrade from 2023. Good review, thanks 👍

[@kieranhayesphotography]

It really does, now I have to say there are a few slight bugs in my version but it's a pre release copy and ON1 told me they were there. The finished version should be really good and a serious time saver.

[@tedfeld3118]

I purchased 2023.5 and installed it on an underperforming Win 10 pc. After receiving a refund, I bought into the hype of 2024 and upgraded my hardware to a new pc running Win 11 with a Nvidia 4070Ti video card. The program is as described... Lightning fast. Brilliance AI works decently but I tend to leave it off when editing raw files in 2 Nikons that are converted to infrared. The white balance is way to off whick impairs introducing faux colour for IR. As of now, the company has not enabled the use of importing my Adobe created. dcp camera profiles for these IR conversions.. For now, Nikon Studio (best WB raw editor for II) is an option. Alternatively, using an older version of LR and PS10 offer solutions for false colour imaging for these raw picture files. Of all the software I did preview, the features and ease of use were reasons for purchasing. If only Adobe wasn't subscription based.

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Hi Ted, good to hear you are getting on well with pr2024. I can imagine there could be issues with your modified sensors alright. Did you get an answer back about using your own camera profiles? Enjoy the editing 👍

[@tedfeld3118]

@kieranhayesphotography the company has said it will be added in an update. For now, introducing colour on IR images seems to work better when Brilliance AI is left off. The effects tab has a basic channel mixer for red - blue channel swaps, and tweaks can be saved as presets. I am enjoying the speed of rendering. I tried cataloging but it doesn't offer much benefit. So accessing picture folders and files (by date), works best. Exporting is much faster thanks to the upgraded hardware.

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Next time I am chatting with them I will ask them about adding your own camera profiles, might get an update for you next week.

[@tedfeld3118]

@kieranhayesphotography that world be awesome. My in camera .dcp ir camera profiles work flawlessly on LR5. Many softwares including ON1 can can't seem to WB IR files. Look forward to them adding this.

[@eddu4361]

What I found out BAI works best on raw files.

[@martinlennon4673]

Got 20% discount using your promo ... thanks 🤓

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Thanks Martin and enjoy, let me know what you think when you get your hands on it. Only a few days to go now for the release :-)

[@maxmillion4216]

I Have the 2024 UI and I think it's a peace of carp. The 2023 UI is much better. I much prefer to do I own processing and not AI

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Hi, we all do things differently, that's the beauty of photography. I always edit my photographs to my own taste or what the client wants, I find Brilliance handy as it's a great base edit, that's all it was meant to be for now anyway. Thankfully you can simply switch if off if you want. You can customise the tool layout a small bit if you want. Or go back to PR 2023 and skip this version if it's not to your liking.

[@scottscrufari]

I downloaded the trial version. It does not offer me anything that my current software doesn’t. Lightroom, Photoshop, and Luminar Neo does everything better than this software. Topaz labs has better sharpening and noise reduction. Automatic masking is not very good in on 1.

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Hi, sorry to hear that, I know this software is not perfect like the masking is still being refined, I posted a video on that before. Like you I also have LR PS Luminar Neo Topaz and DXO on my desktop as well as a few more editing apps. I don't think any of them are perfect although LR Classic is pretty darn close but you pay for the privilge of having that then. When you look at pricing ON1 is nearly the same price as Topaz which is crazy as it has a full DAM and editing platform included. Is it for ebveryone? Certainly not but it is great value for money when you consider everything you get included in the Photo Raw 2024. Thanks for watching and enjoy the editing.

[@AviViljoen]

Clickbait. This isn't a review, it's an ad.

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Not sure how you think that but good luck anyway 😉