Update re Luminar: whilst it has the tools needed for image enhancements my ancient iMac (mid 2010) made adjustments too slowly. After discussion with Tony, I decided to stay with LR and have received a full refund from Luminar on their 60 day money back guarantee.
The promised update to ON1 Photo Raw was released today. This includes minor improvements to the LR catalogue migration tool (that supports hierarchical keywords, collections [not smart ones] and both global and local edits transferred in an editable fashion).
I am running the 30-day free trial but have not tried the LR migration yet. ON1 is quite demanding of compute power but the update is claimed to address some of that (not tried that yet either). However, my pictures processed to try to look the same as those from LR are very similar: an independent viewer was unable to pick a favourite or even to find a significant difference.
The interface doesn't feel as polished as LR but it's not bad. It does have more processing options than LR that may be useful and includes a fractal-based upscaler that sounds very good (no, not tried that yet either).
I looked at the article to which you gave a link, Tony and found the comments that follow even more useful than the article. I copied the most relevant to a word processor for viewing later.
There was some discussion on migrating edits as to whether they are stored in sidecar files or the LR catalogue. It seems that the sidecar file is preferable when it comes to migration (whereas mine are in the catalogue) but I have to re-read this to fully understand why. It was linked with the fact that ON1 uses the folder structure of the computer rather than making a catalogue. There was also discussion on what happened if there was any corruption and whether there was any way to back-up edits like LR does with the catalogue.
There was a lot of discussion about how much slower ON1 is than LR and how much computing power it needs.
Lastly there was concern as to the aggressive algorithms that ON1 uses to eliminate artefacts from the RAW file which has the effect of reducing the resolution of fine detail. This seemed to be noticed by very few photographers and it may be those with expensive high resolution cameras.
My free trial of ON1 has now expired and I have not had time to test the library migration from LR. Experience otherwise is generally positive, it's not as polished as LR and it is slower, though no unusably so, and it could function as a replacement. On the plus side, ON1 does have more features than LR.
I also read, with concern, the comments about the Raw conversion destroying detail. I ran off a couple of TIFFs on the last day of my trial and I intend to compare them with exports from both LR and Canon's own DPP software ... but I haven't had time to do that yet either. I haven't noticed anything awful in the pictures I have processed with ON1; I felt that the comment could be applicable only to certain sensor types, did you read it that way?
I think a presentation is still on the cards but it will likely be after the release of Catalina.
Roy Rainford 