ON1 Photo RAW

ON1 Photo RAW can hand a selection of frames to another application, and Macro Studio accepts them. Pick your bracket in ON1, send it over, and the frames arrive in Macro Studio’s Library ready to stack.

There is nothing to install. Unlike the Lightroom Classic plugin, this uses a feature ON1 already has, so you only have to point it at Macro Studio once.

In Macro Studio, Integrations → Set up ON1 Photo RAW integration opens this page. There is no plugin to install, so that menu entry brings you to the steps below instead of running an installer.

Sending frames from ON1

1. In Browse, select the frames of one focus bracket.
2. Right-click the selection and choose Send to → Send to Other Application…
3. The first time only, pick Macro Studio from the application list. ON1 remembers it, so afterwards it appears directly in the Send to menu.

Macro Studio comes forward, loads your frames in filename order, starts stacking them straight away, and moves you to the Editor to watch it come together. You picked the bracket in ON1; you should not have to pick it again here, or go looking for the result.

If you have Stay in the Library after starting a stack switched on in Preferences, a bracket sent from ON1 ignores it and opens the Editor anyway. That setting is there to keep your place while you work through a folder, and a bracket sent from another application has no folder to keep a place in.

If you wanted to change the selection first

Nothing is lost: the frames are still in the Library. Click the LIBRARY tab to go back, drop the frame you did not want, and stack again.

To take a run out of the set, click the first frame you want and press F for Set First, then click the last one and press L for Set Last. Note that A toggles — with everything already selected it deselects instead, so reach for it to start clean rather than to re-select after a cull. See Loading and selecting for all the ways to choose a set.

Send one bracket at a time

Everything in one send is treated as one stack. Send two brackets together and you get a single stack of all of them, which is not what you want.

So send a bracket, let it stack, then send the next. If you have a whole folder of brackets to get through, Autostack is the tool for that job: it splits a folder into brackets by capture time and stacks them as a batch, without going through ON1 at all.

Getting the result back into ON1

Save your stacked image into the same folder as the frames it came from. ON1’s Browse watches the folders it is showing, so the finished image appears there on its own. You may need to leave and re-enter the folder if ON1 has not noticed yet.

Saving never modifies your originals, so the result always arrives as a new file alongside them.

Which frames ON1 sends

The Send to dialog offers a choice, and both work:

• Edit Original hands over your camera files untouched. Best quality, Macro Studio does its own RAW conversion, and nothing extra is written to your disk.
• Edit a Copy with Settings Applied has ON1 render your edits first and sends those rendered copies instead. Use this when you have already made adjustments in ON1 that you want carried into the stack.

If you are not sure, start with Edit Original.

Stopping ON1 from copying every frame

Choose Edit Original. That is the whole answer, and it is worth setting once and forgetting.

“Edit a Copy with Settings Applied” writes those rendered copies as real files into the same folder as your originals, one per frame, and leaves them there. A ten-frame bracket sent that way leaves ten new TIFFs beside your ten RAWs, every time you send. Edit Original writes nothing at all: ON1 hands over the RAW files where they already are.

The dialog also has a Don’t ask me again tick-box, so you can set Edit Original once and stop being asked.

If you do want ON1’s edits carried into the stack, and so need “Edit a Copy”, check Copy Options first. The defaults are 8-bit sRGB TIFF, and 8 bits leaves much less room for the tonal work a stack goes through. Set 16-bit and a wider colour space.

Those copies are yours to delete, with one thing worth knowing first. If you save a DNG from the stack, Macro Studio needs those frames still on disk to re-open it for Retouch or a Look change, because both work by reaching back into the individual frames. Delete them and the DNG still opens, with its picture and settings intact; what you lose is those two controls, for that file. Edit Original avoids the question entirely, because then the frames are your own camera files and nothing extra has to survive. It is the same trade as the Lightroom plugin’s exported TIFFs.

Other applications

Nothing here is specific to ON1. Any program that can open a selection in an external editor can hand its files to Macro Studio the same way, and on Windows, Macro Studio also appears in File Explorer’s Open with menu for supported image files.

Installing Macro Studio does not take an image type away from the app that already opens it. It adds Macro Studio to the list of applications you can choose, and leaves your existing defaults alone.

If nothing happens

• Macro Studio opens but the Library is empty. Check the file types you sent are ones Macro Studio supports. See Loading and selecting.
• Only some frames arrived. Send the bracket again. Frames handed over one at a time are gathered back into a single selection, and a very slow handover can occasionally be split.
• “No supported images in that selection.” ON1 sent files Macro Studio cannot open. Check File Format under Copy Options, in the same dialog you pick Edit Original from. It starts as TIFF, which is fine, but if it has been changed to Photoshop (PSD) the frames arrive in a format Macro Studio does not read. Set it back to TIFF, or use Edit Original.
• Macro Studio was already open. That is fine and is the faster path. The frames go to the window you already have rather than opening a second one.