A three part series on ON1 Photo RAW 2026 – The Best Bits! is designed to highlight what is different in ON1 Photo RAW 2026 to earlier versions from a user perspective.
ON1 Photo RAW has been around for a while now and in it’s latest form, ON1 Photo RAW 2026.2, it has benefitted from a number of improvements over earlier versions, These relate to performance enhancements through to changes in the UI, accessibility, layout and ease of use.
If you are starting up ON1 PR 2026 for the first time, one immediate thing you’ll notice are some splash / help screens. These provide new users with some useful guidance on getting started with ON1 PR 2026. If you are a new user, take a little time to study these screens as the information provided is quite helpful. There is of course a whole range of support tools available under the Help menu which again will help new users get started more quickly.
PART 2 – The Editing / Effects Panel
In this article we are going to take a look at one of the major areas of change in ON1 Photo RAW, that is changes to the editing panel and in particular, the Effects panel. Although not particularly earth shattering, the the layout of the various Effects when you enter the Effects Panel can be a little daunting for new users. Gone is the all-in-one list of effects, these being replaced by a list of 4 categories with various effects placed below them. These categories, when you select Add Filter are:
- Essential
- Creative
- Landscape and
- Legacy
In addition, ON1 has thoughtfully provided you with some pre-built options including
- Blank
- Last Used
- ON1 Recommends
- Lightroom
- Capture One and
- Other
Since I am not a big Lightroom or Capture One user I tend to select only the ON1 Recommends, especially if I need a start point. or most likely, Last Used as I tend to be a stick with what I like. I have yet to figure out what purpose Other provides as you can only seem to associate one effect to it. Maybe I am missing something here!! The bonus here is that if you select last used, it will apply your last used effects “as applied” to every image you open for editing. This can be a huge time saver if you want to process images in a similar way. You can of course already do this using the Copy Settings or Paste from a Previous Edit options in the menu when browsing (right click on an image in browse) but sometimes you might just want to adjust your parameters and take your time image by image. The Copy Settings option in particular is useful for batch editing.
As with the last two or three versions of ON1 Photo RAW, effects can be applied to the scene as a whole or limited to just parts of the scene, for example, to the background, sky, subject, foreground etc when you add the effect. Alternatively, you can add the effect and then use one of the new layer options to apply a mask to the scene. For example, here I have added a depth mask and used it to warm up the foreground subject slightly. In addition. I have applied a B&W Film LUT (with appropriate grain), a soft Vignette, which can be dragged around the screen to help you find the best location, and a simple border with a keystroke. This type of edit can be easily achieved in just a couple of clicks and more importantly, applied to other images in just one additional click. ON1 Photo RAW is nothing if not productive!
Although not new, I will mention the ability of ON1 Photo RAW to create versions for you to experiment with. This option is found pretty much everywhere nowadays but it is a great option if you like exploring the various ways that you can stylise your images.
Gone in ON1 Photo RAW 2026, or at least well hidden, is the old method of masking the various parts of the screen. In the two shots below, one before and one after editing, we can see a number of Effects where masks have been added. These are basically controlled by software AI / algorithms. For example, in the editing image you can see five applied effects including Dynamic Contrast and Tone Enhancement. The masks applied to these are basically depth related and these masks can be tweaked using the mask controls. In the case of Depth Masking, you are basically bringing areas of the scene into focus ie applying a mask to them. This is very useful for fine grain control over the image. Let’s take a look.
In the images below we can see a effect of adding depth lighting to the image.
