Hopefully you’ve found the Photo RAW Project by now and have been engaging with our discussions on all of the great ideas. To date, we’ve had over 200 submissions since we launched the project just over a ooonth ago. It has become an indispensable tool for me and helps me plan what features to tackle next. I thought I would share some of my favorite ideas directly from the project. A Dano’s Top 10 list if you would… 

  1. Local Adjustments with Intelligent Brush — “A feature I will like is local adjustments (exposure, clarity, sharpening, shadows, etc.) with an intelligent brush that finds automatically the edges, like in Camera Raw.” Great news! This is one we are working on right now and are pretty exited about. The new Local Adjustments tab will let you use the Brush, including the Perfect Brush, and the gradient masking bug to selectively apply local adjustments that can be edited inside of Develop and Effects with Photo RAW.
  2. Fuji X-Trans Processing — We see this request almost everyday.  Photographers want great processing from their Fuji X-Trans sensors. For those of you who aren’t familiar with these sensors, the RGB filter pattern over the sensor doesn’t use the the normal RGBG Bayer pattern. It uses a unique one that requires a special debayering algorithm. We are working on our decoding of X-Trans RAW photos now. I hope to have some examples soon for everyone to look at. Photographers also want to take advantage of the film-based looks that Fuji offers in-camera.  This is something that we will start work on this winter and will be part of a free update next year.
  3. Multiple Monitors — “A must. Main, color corrected screen, for editing – full screen photo. All the toolboxes are one the second screen!”  Today about 15% of our users have more than one display. It would be great to let you put the controls on one display and large preview on the main display or to have thumbnails on one and big preview on the other.
  4. Reduce PSD Size — A common refrain we hear is that the PSD files that we create are really big. Well, yes they are. Photoshop compresses PSDs. Currently we don’t do that, but we will be soon. However, all this may be moot as well. With the new non-destructive raw photo editor ON1 Photo RAW, you won’t be making PSD files nearly as often, only when you export out a photo to work in Layers or Photoshop. Most of the time all of your edits will be stored as instructions, taking almost no space, and your original photo will be left untouched.
  5. Lightroom Catalog Import — Working with Lightroom data is the biggest request we have since we announced. We will develop a special tool to import your Lightroom presets and albums as well as interpret your Lightroom edits on a photo. This will be part of a free update in the winter.
  6. Versions — Call them versions, snapshots or virtual copies they all serve the same function, to have multiple settings for the same photo without having to make a copy of the original. This is a really handy feature to many and one that we will be adding as part of a free update in the Winter.
  7. Haze — “I have come to rely on dehaze to a certain extent on almost all my new images. Please include it. Thanks.” We have had a ton of comments on haze or dehaze. We are definitely working on that now and it will be in the fall release of Photo RAW. One of our concerns with it is giving you the control over how much the saturation increases as you decrease the haze. See this blog post for more details.
  8. Panorama Stitching — There’s a great conversion on this topic in the Photo RAW Project. This is something we will be looking at in the future, along with it’s technological sisters, HDR merging and aligning layers. No timeframe yet but we are thinking about it.
  9. Perspective and Lens Correction — ON1 Photo RAW will add a new Transform pane which will help reduce barrel distortion as well a correct perspective and leveling.
  10. Identify the Sharpest in a Set of Photos — This has always been a time consuming process for photographers. I remember hours spent on a light table with loupe picking out the the best frame. Digital photography hasn’t made this much easier. We are working on better ways to compare photos such as a new compare view which will allow you to view view, zoom and pan multiple photos at the same time as well as new sharpness overlay that will color-code the sharp areas in your photos.

Do you have your own Top 10? Let me know what they are by leaving a comment.