New ON1 Photo RAW 2023.1 healing, copying and moving tools rated

ON1 Photo RAW has a very effective set of retouching tools, including a Retouch Brush for smaller spots, a Perfect Erase tool for fuss-free object removal, a Clone Stamp tool for regular cloning and, perhaps the most effective, a Healing Brush which kind of combines cloning with healing so. that you get to choose the source for your repair but the software blends it in.

With the ON1 Photo RAW 2023.1 update, this Healing Brush tool gets a major upgrade. You could already move the source area around to find the best match, but now you can transform the repair to flip it, scale it up or down or rotate it to better match the area you’re repairing.

That’s not all. With new Copy and Move options, you can now duplicate objects (and scale them) to move them to different parts of the scene, or simply move an object from one place to another.

All this is driven by ON1’s AI powered healing tech to make your repairs and adjustments as ‘invisible’ as possible. You get similar tools in Capture One, Lightroom and Lightroom Classic and DxO PhotoLab, but here ON1 seems to have taken things just a step further.

Are ON1 Photo RAW’s new Healing Brush options effective?

They can be very effective indeed, but it depends on the characteristics of the area you’re trying to repair and where there are matching areas nearby. Sometimes you get a great result immediately, but sometimes you might have to make two or more attempts to make the right initial selection so that you include all of the subject and enough but not too much of its surroundings.

The new transform tools certainly help when you have to match your repair with source areas which are smaller, or angled differently. Note, though, that while you can flip, rotate and scale your source area, there’s no perspective control.

It doesn’t take long, though, to get a good result even with tricky repairs, and you can always go back afterwards and use a smaller retouch repair to clean up any little problem areas.

The new Copy feature is perhaps more of a reality distortion novelty than something most photographers would use. The ability to flip, rotate and scale your copy can disguise what you’ve done pretty well.

The Move option is useful if you decide an object is simply in the wrong place for your composition but still needs to be in the picture. Both the Copy and Move features work best if there’s clear space or texture around the object, and you do have to select which one you want to use before creating your mask.

On the whole, ON1 Photo RAW 2023.1’s new Healing Brush options are very good. They don’t always work at the first attempt, and some objects just can’t be easily separated from their backgrounds and covered up, but to get retouching tools this effective in a non-destructive workflow is pretty impressive.

If you’ve already got ON1 Photo RAW 2023, you should definitely update to 2023.1. If you haven’t, these new retouching options might just convince you to give it a go. Use the links below to get a discount from the ON1 store, or simply download the 14-day trial version to try it out for yourself.