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ON1 just told its users, in plain terms, where most of its engineering time actually goes — and it isn’t new filters. In a post from VP of Product Dan Harlacher, the company says roughly two-thirds of its engineering team is currently working on maintaining, modernizing, and improving existing code rather than shipping headline features.
What is ON1 Photo RAW?
If you’re not already a user, ON1 Photo RAW is a Lightroom alternative aimed at photographers who want RAW processing, layers, masking, and effects in one non-subscription app. It’s smaller than Adobe or Capture One in market share, but it’s built a loyal base among photographers who like owning their software outright and who’ve stuck around through years of incremental raw-engine and performance work.
What ON1 actually announced
This isn’t a version bump or a feature launch, instead it’s a roadmap disclosure, and a fairly candid one. The headline items:
- AI inference is moving off DirectML and onto WinML on Windows. Harlacher says early testing shows “2x speed improvements on some GPUs,” and the move also opens the door to running AI features on NPUs (the dedicated AI chips now showing up in newer laptops) instead of leaning entirely on the GPU.
- The rendering engine is dropping OpenGL in favor of native graphics APIs — Direct3D 12 on Windows, Metal on Mac and iOS, Vulkan on Android. That’s the layer responsible for how responsive brushes, masks, and layered effects feel in real time.
- The raw processing engine, built in-house roughly a decade ago, is getting a real pass. ON1 says it’s targeting more predictable shadow and highlight sliders and better default color and saturation straight out of raw conversion — in other words, files that look more finished before you touch a single slider.
- Smaller items rounding it out: an overhauled component installer (less disruption when the app updates its thousands of components), retouching improvements to the Perfect Eraser and generative inpainting, and a document-management code refactor aimed at reducing crashes and instability.
Why this is worth paying attention to
Engineering-debt posts are rare in this space, and that’s exactly why this one is notable. Most vendors save their communication budget for feature announcements, not for “here’s the unglamorous infrastructure work we’re doing instead.” ON1 choosing to explain the plumbing, and to admit their RAW engine hasn’t fundamentally changed in ten years, is a bet that transparency builds more trust with a user base than another quarterly “10 new looks” post would.
It’s also a tell about where ON1 sees its actual weaknesses. Predictable shadow/highlight behavior and default color accuracy straight from raw are the kind of thing you only fix if users have been complaining about them for a while, and installer disruption and startup slowness are classic “death by a thousand cuts” complaints rather than flashy problems. If you’ve used Photo RAW and found the raw conversion inconsistent between images, or found the app’s updater more annoying than it should be, this post is ON1 telling you they’ve heard you.
What it means for your workflow
None of this changes anything about Photo RAW today, there’s no build number, no ship date, and no beta attached to this post. Treat it as a signal, not a release. If you’re evaluating ON1 against Lightroom or Capture One right now, the honest read is: the RAW engine you’d be adopting is the pre-overhaul one, so don’t factor in promised improvements when making that call.
If you’re already an ON1 user who’s been annoyed by inconsistent RAE defaults or a clunky updater, this is a reasonable reason to stick around and see what actually ships rather than jumping ship over infrastructure gripes the company says it’s already working on.
Roadmap posts are cheap to write and easy to walk back, so the real test is whether any of this shows up in a release note in the next few months. Worth bookmarking and checking back on.
More reading: Radiant Photo 2 Review: Why I’m Very Excited About This App
