Editing in ON1 Photo RAW MAX 2026 — the hands-on walkthrough

It's written from the official ON1 Photo RAW 2026 User Guide (583 pages), a copy of which lives at ../Reference-Manuals/ON1-Photo-RAW-2026-User-Guide.pdf; the same guide is online at on1.clickhelp.co. Where the guide and this note differ, the guide wins — tell me and I'll fix it. We build this walkthrough one module at a time, at your pace: each module is a short lesson you can sit down and do, and we only move to the next when you're ready. Module 1 (below) is written in full; the rest are queued in the roadmap and I'll write each one when we get there.

01.How ON1 is organized — three rooms and one rule

When ON1 opens you land on the Home screen, but you'll spend almost all your time in two "rooms," and you switch between them with the Module Selector in the top-left corner of the window:

• Browse — the room where you find, import, sort, and cull your photos. Think of it as your light table: every shot from a shoot laid out so you can pick the keepers. Nothing here changes a pixel of the image; it's about organizing and choosing.
• Edit — the room where you actually develop and retouch a chosen photo. Inside Edit are several tabs you'll meet in order: Develop (the core brightness/color work), Effects (looks and stylizing), Portrait AI (face retouching), Sky Swap AI (replacing skies), and Local (changing only part of the picture), plus the masking and retouching tools.

After Edit comes Output — not really a room but a set of finishing actions: Export (make a shareable JPEG), Resize AI (enlarge for big prints), and Print. So the whole journey, end to end, is:

Browse (find + cull) → Edit (Develop → Effects / Portrait / Sky → Local + retouch) → Output (Export / Resize / Print)

That order is not a coincidence — it's the nine-step edit order from editing from zero wearing ON1's clothes. Here is the exact map, so you always know which room a step lives in:

The universal edit step	Where it lives in ON1
1. Cull the keepers	Browse — star ratings, Likes, Compare view, Focus Mask
2. Crop & straighten	Edit — the Crop tool
3. White balance	Edit › Develop — Tone & Color pane (Temperature/Tint)
4. Exposure & contrast	Edit › Develop — Tone & Color pane
5. Recover highlights / lift shadows	Edit › Develop — Tone & Color pane
6. Color (vibrance/saturation/HSL)	Edit › Develop — Color block, and Effects
7. Local adjustments (masked)	Edit › Local, plus the Masking tools and Portrait AI / Sky Swap AI
8. Sharpening & noise reduction	Edit › Develop — Noise & Sharpening pane (and NoNoise-grade AI)
9. Export	Output — Export, or Resize AI for big prints, or Print

The one rule to internalize first — stay non-destructive. Recall from editing from zero that ON1 never rewrites your .NEF; it stores your edits as a list of instructions. There is exactly one way to break that promise, and the guide warns about it explicitly: when ON1 first launches it shows a Getting Started window with a button called "Edit a Single Photo." Do not use that button for your real work — it opens one file straight into Edit and then asks you to save a copy, which is the old destructive way. Instead, always go through Browse: find the photo, select it, and click the Edit module selector. Same destination, but your original stays untouched and every slider stays editable forever. Make this a reflex.

02.Module 1 — Browse: get your photos in, then pick the keepers

This module covers the first two steps of every edit — import and cull — both of which happen entirely in the Browse room, before you touch a single brightness slider. It's the least glamorous part and the one beginners rush; doing it well is what makes everything after it pleasant.

1a. Import — copy the card onto your computer, with a backup

Your photos are sitting on the memory cards in the camera. The goal of import is to copy them onto your computer's drive in an organized place — and, critically, to make a second copy at the same time, because (as the zero note stressed) non-destructive editing is worthless if the one-and-only original dies with a failed drive.

Pop the card into your card reader (your ProGrade Digital CFexpress + SD reader takes both of your cards), or connect the camera by USB; then in Browse choose File ▸ Import. The Import window opens. It has a lot of panes, but as a beginner you only need to care about a few:

1. The preview grid fills with every photo on the card, each with a checkmark. By default they're all selected for import. You can uncheck individual frames, but it's usually fine to bring everything in and cull after.
2. Destination pane — the only pane you're required to set. This is where the photos will live on your computer. Pick a sensible permanent home and let ON1 build a dated subfolder for each shoot. A clean scheme for you: a top-level Pictures/Photography/ folder, and in the Put in Subfolder field type something like 2026-06-11 Recital (date-first names sort themselves chronologically).
3. Secondary Folder (inside Destination) — turn this on. This is your live backup: tick it and choose a different drive — an external SSD, or your TerraMaster NAS — and ON1 copies every imported photo there too, in the same moment. Now you have two copies before you've done anything. This single checkbox is the cheapest insurance in photography; use it every import.
4. Don't Import Duplicates — leave this on. ON1 remembers what it has already imported, so if you re-insert a card you didn't wipe, it quietly skips the shots you already have instead of making messy copies.

Leave the Rename, Metadata, and Photo Settings panes alone for now — they're conveniences you'll grow into. Click Import. A progress bar runs in the lower-right, and when it finishes your shoot is sitting in that dated folder, with a twin copy safely on the second drive. (Your .NEF files on the fast SanDisk Extreme PRO CFexpress copy quickest — up to ~1700 MB/s read through the ProGrade reader; the SanDisk microSD in the SD slot is slower but holds more.)

1b. Cull — separate the keepers from the rejects

Now the light-table work. You came home from a recital with, say, 600 frames; maybe 30 deserve editing. Culling is finding those 30 fast, and ON1 gives you purpose-built tools for it.

First, learn the four views — you switch with single keys:

• Grid (press G) — thumbnails, the whole shoot at a glance. Where you start.
• Detail / Photo (press E, or double-click a thumbnail) — one photo big, to judge it properly. Zoom in to check sharpness.
• Filmstrip (press F) — one big photo with a strip of the others along the bottom; arrow-key through them quickly.
• Compare (press C) — several photos side by side at once. This is the burst-killer: when you fired ten frames of one leap, Compare lets you put them next to each other, zoom all together, and keep only the single best pose with the eyes sharp.

Two overlays do the hard judging for you. From a dim, fast-motion dance shoot, your two enemies are blur and blown highlights — and ON1 can highlight both:

• Focus Mask — press Shift+Alt+J (hold Shift+Alt, tap J). Every genuinely sharp area glows bright green. Glance at a dance frame: if the green sits on her face and eyes, it's a keeper; if the green is on the background and her face is bare, she was motion-blurred — reject it. This turns "is this one sharp enough?" from a squinting guess into a one-look answer.
• Clipping — press J. Pure-white blown areas flash red; pure-black crushed areas flash blue. A little red on a hot spotlight is normal; a whole white costume flashing red means you lost that detail (the same "blinkies" idea from the exposure triangle note, now on your computer).

Then mark your picks. ON1 gives three independent marking systems; as a beginner, use just one to start — the Likes system is the simplest:

• Like / Reject — press P to Like a keeper (a filled heart), X to reject a dud, U to clear. That's the whole vocabulary you need at first: P for "yes," X for "no."
• (Later, when you want finer grades, star ratings live on keys 1–5 — photographers often use 5 for "portfolio" and 1 for "barely" — and the backtick ` clears stars. Color labels are on 6–9 and 0. Stars and colors are saved into the file's metadata so they show up in Lightroom too; Likes are ON1-only.)

Turn on Auto Advance (in the Photo menu). With it on, the moment you press P or X, ON1 stamps the photo and jumps to the next one — so you can rip through 600 frames in a steady rhythm: look, P or X, look, P or X, never touching the mouse.

The practical pass: in Grid view with Focus Mask on, go through the whole shoot once, pressing X on anything blurred or with eyes shut and P on the clear contenders. Then filter to just your Likes (the search/filter bar at the top), drop into Compare view to settle the near-duplicate bursts, and you're left with a tidy set of keepers — the only photos you'll spend editing time on. That discipline, established here, is what makes the Edit room a joy instead of a 600-photo slog.

You've now done steps 1–2 of the edit order, the ON1 way. Your keepers are imported, backed up, and flagged. The next module opens the Edit room and the Develop tab — crop and straighten, then set white balance and exposure on your first real photo. Say the word and we'll do Module 2.

03.The roadmap — what each module will cover

We'll write these together, in order, each grounded in the guide and in the same plain-language voice:

• Module 1 — Browse: import & cull. ✅ Done (above).
• Module 2 — Edit ▸ Develop, part 1: crop & straighten, white balance, basic tone. Getting into Edit non-destructively; the Crop tool; the Tone & Color pane; fixing those orange stage-light casts.
• Module 3 — Develop, part 2: highlights, shadows, color, and AI noise reduction. Rescuing blown spotlights and lifting dark costumes; vibrance vs. saturation; cleaning ISO-6400 grain.
• Module 4 — Local adjustments & AI masking. Brightening only her face; darkening only a sky; the Masking Brush, Quick Mask AI, and Super Select AI.
• Module 5 — Portrait AI. Gentle, natural face retouching for your dance portraits.
• Module 6 — Effects & presets. Building a consistent look and saving it to apply in one click.
• Module 7 — Sky Swap AI (landscapes) and the combine tools (panorama, HDR) as needed.
• Module 8 — Output: Export, Resize AI, and Print. Making the right JPEG for the web gallery vs. a big print; how large Resize AI can push a 24.5 MP file.

If any concept underneath a step ever feels shaky, the why is always one link away in editing from zero, and the camera-side ideas are in the exposure triangle.