Truth be told, I never was fan of Adobe Photoshop nor of Lightroom, and for photo processing/editing relied on Iridient Developer, the image-conversion application designed specifically for OS X, especially as I'm a Fuji X and GFX user. I also used Color Efex Pro to refine what Iridient could not provide. For black and white work, I used Silver Efex Pro2 which -in my view- is superlative in monochromatic conversion.
While I never retouch my travel and street photographs, preferring to apply a photo journalistic ethic to these two types of photography, I have progressively come to the realization that the third type of my photography; namely fashion story-telling, does require a different way of post processing...hence ON1.
I am also a relatively recent aficionado of color-grading, getting inspiration from Japanese photographers who seem to favor this look...hence ON1 (again). Color grading is the process of enhancing the color, saturation and contrast of an image. Photographers use it to create specific moods in their photos. One can add blue hues to make a picture appear cold, or yellow and orange to make it look warm. The Japanese color-grading "look" is generally cinematic blue-green such as the one in the top photograph of Lise Liu.
The ease by which ON1 -with its presets- can achieve this color grading look, as well as others means that I am able to process the photographs by choosing one or more of the presets in a few moments...and manually refine the final results should I choose to.
ON1 also offers a program ON1 Portrait AI 2021 which easily allows the user to apply what I call "plastic surgery" to the faces of one's subjects. However, I am more used to another program called Portrait Pro that essentially has the same functions.
