ON1 Photo Raw features “Browse” mode. You can view, rate, delete, even edit from ANYWHERE—desktop, hard drive, local drive, cloud based such as Dropbox — all without importing anything.

I can't believe after you said you're done with PS and LR that everyone keeps recommending PS and LR. I felt like you did -- PS is so non-intuitive and complicated and I did not want a subscription service.

I started using On1 Photo RAW about five years ago--there is a learning curve no doubt but it does just about everything LR does PLUS you can work in Layers when/if you get to that point -- something LR doesn't do so you have to go back and forth LR/PS/LR. Ugh!!!

On1 has MANY MANY "how to" videos for their users plus many more done by people like Matt Klauskauski, Scott Davenport and others on YouTube.

They are always improving it and for my money, does anything I could ever want to do to a photo and I started out with film about 40 years ago and had a darkroom in my house. You do not need Photoshop!!!

I have two suggestions --- the first is that On1 Photo RAW 2022 has a really awesome Portrait module that smooths skin, whitens teeth, brightens eyes in a single click. If you think it's too much, you can tone down the entire filter to anywhere between 0 - 100%. It is outstanding. Of course, you can also go in and do additional work on flyaway hairs, etc. My son does senior portrait for a college nearby and I do his retouching using On1. I think the cost of On1 is worth the Portrait module alone, but they also have the best De-Noise software on the market and can do anything else in terms of photo-editing. It is non-subscription.

If you want to outsource the whole process, try https://www.retouchup.com. It is a family owned business with employees in Lima Peru who know Photoshop inside out because that's all they do and the prices are really reasonable. My son has used them many times and the service is really fast and not very expensive. They do everything from simple colors corrections to taking glares out of glasses.

MPix is my printer if choice. I once tested a favorite photograph and had it printed by White Wall, Adorama pix and MPix. MPix not only did the best job but was less expensive than White Wall.

My MacBook Pro is from 2015, bought refurbished in 2018. It has half the RAM and half the storage space of yours and I'm not seeing those kind of problems. Before buying a new one, I'd try to dig a little deeper on what might be going on.

I have been using On1 for about five or six years now and I am not annoyed with their marketing. This is my primary post-processing software and I am thrilled to have everything in one package. But for people who are dedicated to Photoshop and Lightroom, why shouldn't they be able to buy these modules one at a time if they want to?

Hey Bill Nikon! Who makes that little carry handle? We want to know!!! Thanks.

I bought Topaz DeNoise when it first came out and was pretty happy with it. However, I since bought the ON1 photo Raw 2022, which includes NoNoise AI. IMHO, it blows Topaz out of the water. I think noNoise is also available as a separate plug-in if you don’t want the complete software package.

I’ve often had questions about when a release was necessary. This post on danheller.com is surely the most thorough discussion of why and when you would need a model release. Thank you so much for sharing.

I know Photoshop is incredibly powerful but it is also incredibly complex and totally unintuitive. In fact it was only in response to Apple’s Aperture software that Adobe came up with LR as a data manager but if you wanted to do something more complicated, you had to make basic adjustments in LR and then take it into PS. For my money, ON1 does it all—you can Browse photos from ANY photo repository—Hard drive, desktop, External drive, Dropbox etc instead of making a “Catalog within LR”. The editing capabilities are on a par with LR; the Effects and Portrait AI modules are exceptionally good. And you can do composite work in Layers instead of taking your image out of LR and moving to PS. Finally, as someone who has been using Topaz software, On1’s NoNoise AI is the best on the market. I probably don’t know how to take advantage of all it’s capabilities, but I believe ON1 is just getting better and better and better.

I'm really surprised to hear you got no help from On1 Help. They have always been pretty responsive. I am not a techie so I'm not sure about this, but I thought when you run On1 as a "standalone" application, it means you're using it as your main photo processing app. That if you use Photoshop or Lightroom or some other app that automatically implies you're using On1 as a "plug in". Since it's clear you're using other software, might that be the problem?

I carried my camera (Nikon 7200) and a few different zoom lenses into Lauray Caverns a few years ago and got some wonderful shots, but found the most challenging aspect of the shoot was the fact that everything underground was mostly very damp/wet or dripping. Also, the most dramatic rock formations feature were artificially lit by spotlights, giving extremely high contrast situations. I suppose a polarizing filter would have helped but I didn't have one with me. I had to do a lot of post-processing to get some good shots out of hundreds taken. I have found the same challenge with shooting giant Redwoods. It's generally pretty dark under the canopy but very often everything is glistening with droplets of water. Figuring out how to deal with the underground conditions was more critical than deciding what lens to use.

Would love to hear how others have mastered these conditions.

Topaz Denoise has been the gold standard, but On1 Just released NoNoise this week and as I have both, I was able to do a little comparison. I think NoNoise may be the new gold standard.

Scott Davenport on YouTube does a comparison of Lightroom, ON1 NoNoise and Topaz. The new NoNoise came out ahead in terms of noise reduction, sharpening details and speed.

I installed ON1 NoNoise and am really impressed. I have Topaz version and used it a few times but it was excruciatingly slow on my computer, which is fairly new, has plenty of space on the hard drive snd 16 Gigs RAM. I never did figure out why it was so slow but ON1 NoNoise works much faster and I think the results are clearly superior to Topaz. This is a winner!!!