I've been using ON1 for a few years for processing RAW files. Do I like it? Is this a review? Hmmm.... maybe I'll do this in time. I have sent EMails to them in the past, and they were ignored. For now I'll just say I use it as it's OK, I'm kinda used to it, and it allows you to buy it rather than renting. But moving on....
A recent issue that really bugged me is how it handles the loading of pre-edited photos. I ran into this issue when I loaded the program up to do some editing and I was unable to load a file. I didn't get what was happening at first, and I kept thinking it was frozen so I'd quit it, only to find it doing the same on the next load. I think I even ended up un-installing it and using a different version just to get some editing done now now now. However, and I'm not 100% sure how I worked this out, I eventually noticed that it was not frozen. It was just busy. And it was busy with a file that I had added noise processing to.
Oh.
See it turns out there is no caching of processed images, which is OK I suppose. Not sure why at the same time though as it asks you to give a location for a working and a cache location, which ends up being sized in the gigabytes... Anyway, so it needs to re-process the file. Which in some cases (on at least my average laptop) it takes around 30 minutes. This to me is a questionable decision, especially since you can't cancel it. If you, for example, select another image, you can see it just adds that to a loading processing queue (which you can thankfully view) and continues doing work you clearly don't care about. Thus browsing through photos can build up a queue that could take hours to process, and thus not let you do any work, as it refuses to allow any editing if the loading queue is busy. Once I worked it out I tried to always select something different before I quit, but the logic of what it actually sees as the last job eludes me so that didn't help. Eventually I decided the solution was to never save the option of anything that takes more than a few seconds to process, and I've been happier ever since.
But this to me is such a questionable decision. Why can't it cancel the job if you select another photo? Or, why doesn't it warn you before doing something so demanding? It's issues like this that make me consider looking elsewhere again. Which I might to do and then I can do a comparative review...
