Ellen likes fresh vegetables, local farm raised meat, and eggs. Going to the local Farmers Market is part of her weekly routine. There’s  also a farm here that grows flowers. Each week they bring in the most recent blooms from their acres of wild flowers.

Below is this weeks crop. Pretty impressive.

This image was finished with ON1 Photo RAW. It was shot indoors, no flash. Using ON1, rather than Lightroom was a test. The flow was to use multiple softwares that have specific strengths that general editors do not and see how well the flow worked. Most editors don’t ’play well with others’. This is one of Lightroom’s strengths.

The work flow was;

• ON1 was used to crop, apply a mask to the background, run a color enhancer, last soften the colors.
• The image was sent to Topaz DeNoise for a standard low light DeNoise. Topaz saved the modified image back to ON1 as a tiff file.
• The image was sent to DxO Color Efex. A contrast filter was applied, a detail enhanced was applied, but deleted, a darken/lighten center filter was applied. Color Efex saved the modified image back to ON1 as a tiff file.
• ON1  assigned a color code to mark the image as complete, an export function saved the finished image to jpg, with a predefined date and name, in a new subfolder it created under the original folder.

The end result was this image, just about the same as Lightroom would have made. And it actually took the same time I would have spent in Adobe. ON1 is faster than Lightroom (much faster) and has the same interactions with other imaging systems so it’s really nothing different than I would have done in LR.

If the editor works smooth the transition is not all that much different than if I had done the work directly inside an editor. Except these softwares do the function better, they’re made for specific purposes, not a one size fits all.

OK, this is now much longer than I had planned so I will go to the final goal in post processing for me. The best I can get is using special software on multiple images. Basically get the first image in a series, like a Heron in flight over a swamp, the way I want. Then have all the other images in that series get the changes ‘pasted’ to them. Consistency across them all. With the flow above it’s easy, even using multiple softwares, if the editor ‘plays well with others’.

ON1 is getting pretty close, and works fast, at an inexpensive one time purchase.