Is on1 photo raw 2018 worth upgrading from 2017

With the 2017 version I got interested again, but I found myself mostly using it for Resize and not much else. I was frustrated with them crashing, features I loved being removed, and something that remained being uninteresting to me. I was unhappy with on1 products for a few years, so I stopped covering them on my blog. Want to see what else is new? Start with the video above, then check out these videos. I never quite got the hang of the chisel tool in the past, but this video here gave me one of those chimpanzee moments (you know, ooh, ooh) and I immediately wanted to go try it out. Maybe this is old news to you pano experts out there, but if you are like me and wondered how you could do this - this is it! Pretty sweet! Mask Blur Chisel However, I thought this demo which shows how it not only does a good job creating panos, but it also adds metadata to make Facebook treat it as a spinnable pano too:

Some people love their panos, but I hate them. However, the image shown at the top of the article features one that I processed using HDR only (no presets) for very fast and realistic results. Sadly, this video doesn't do it justice because it kinda ends up with an image that doesn't look so hot. This means that the HDR merge is never really final, and I can always go dial back in the dark and bright areas that might get messed up while editing. However, I really have loved the fine grain control it offers with RAW images and how it it saves the merged file in a special format so that I can make non-destructive re-edits at anytime. Honestly, I didn't expect much as I've really been loving Aurora 2018 HDR as I prepare for my upcoming review. I was super impressed with how fast and well this feature worked.

Tonight in advance of the launch I finally kicked the tires and got both surprised and shocked by some of the changes so I thought I'd fill you in on some of the ones that I think are worth your time to check out.

As a result, I've been rocking along with on1 Photo RAW 2017 not paying much attention to what's coming next. I'm pretty busy these days so I don't have time for betas.

Is on1 photo raw 2018 worth upgrading from 2017