It is almost always better to be kind & encouraging than to be critical of someone's efforts. Most folks ,here, tend to seek the later and offer critiques if asked to do so and generally with the proper solutions in tow....otherwise they'll say very little and move on.

Everybody takes bad pictures. I enjoy looking at all the pictures....not just the special ones, but the Not so Special ones as well.......at least they are trying to please me and I appreciate their time & efforts .

Kindness is never out of fashion.

Gene51, as usual, has given a thorough and thoughtful reply.

As for subscription model, I also agree with his comments. While ON1 (and several others) promote that you own the software, ON1 (and others) come out with a major upgrade with new features every year. Yes, you do get to control the timing of the spending, and if you don’t want the new features (and not talking bug fixes, but really enhancements), you can always wait, but if you do want it, it is about 120 (maybe less with discount) and, look at that, about $10 per month. With LR/PS subscription, you get these new features as they roll them out.

Personally, I do like ON1. It is my primary RAW editor. I also use Apply Photos for “quick cleanups” of jpegs (I shoot HS sports (RAW plus jpeg) as I can whip through it faster and get out to the school website. Any more serious work, including anything I want to print, goes through ON1. I also like that ON1 allows me to use the native file/folder structure and just pointing the software at this “root” gets me everything in it, but I am not limited to making every move from within ON1, the way LR does.

So, definitely worth downloading the trial version when you have time to learn and put it through its paces. Then you will know if it is right for you.

Happy Holidays

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.

Funny you should ask. I have just upgraded my ON1 RAW 2018 to 2022.1 recently. I also have DXO Photolab 4 Elite. As well as NIK collection from DXO. I tried DXO 5 but they still do not support Nikon's A1000 model. My lady bought one for travel. I have contacted DXO on that issue and the reply was less than satisfactory. I gave up on Adobe over a year ago after an update screwed up both LRC and PS for the third time. I switched to DXO and Affinity Photo.

After using DXO for a year I find that ON1 RAW 2022 is easier to use now. Their workflows are similar and the ON1 processing (export) is much faster. Plus it does process Nikon A1000 NRW files.

Do download the trial ON1 to be sure it will run. My laptop will not run it due to its graphic chip. It's 8 years old so I was not surprised. I did have to upgrade my desktop in 2018 to run ON1. But I got a deal for the app at Shutterfest.

ON1 also has a decent Metadata editor where DXO 4 does not but DXO 5 does. I use Nikon's NX studio and transfer apps as well for file renaming and metadata edits. Been using that since 2009 with my first digital camera.

I have never had the use for LRC catalog system and found it annoying at times. ON1 browser is all I need. It does have a catlog of sorts that you can use to point to favorites and DXO has projects that you can build. My achiving system moves my files between 3 different devices. I offload images from my desktop to a NAS and other external devices to freeup space. That broke LRC catalog. Granted there are ways to use LRC to do that but I am a retired IT pro and I do the file management. I have had apps that have deleted files in the past.

Good luck. Happy Holidays to you.