ON1 Resize AI 2026 *seems* pretty good

[ishwanu]

Although I'm not particularly interested in resizing software, I got an email notice about this and briefly checked out some demonstrations and comparisons.

I've learned not to trust ON1's own demos of new features, but a look at a couple of these YouTube reviews suggests that this one might actually work better than the competition in some cases, depending on the subject content.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=on1+resize+ai+2026

I assume it will also be rolled into the complete Photo RAW 2026 package in the coming months, which typically costs less than any two of the ON1 standalone tools.

 

[s_grins]

Thanks for insides

Best.

S.

 

[ajscullard]

I've been using Resize 2026 for a couple of weeks now, mainly as a plug-in for Photoshop. Here's what I have found so far:

here are Standard and High Quality - see ON1's web site for the descriptions.

Both are considerably slower than 2025. For the same resize by about 1.5 times the original, the numbers are:

2025 - 0 min 19.30 secs, 2026 Standard - 1 min 16.49 secs, 2026 High - 1 min 19.55 sec. The progress bar on both 2026 resizes goes along fairly quickly until about 95% when it just stops, you think it's crashed, then after a further 30 seconds or so it suddenly completes and shows the resized image.

Standard is slightly better than Resize 2025 - crisper detail and smoother "flat" areas.

High Quality is, as you'd expect, slightly better again but with a major flaw (see below)

When I first tried the 2026 version, the Standard resize crashed every time, losing all the work I had done in Ps. I reported this to ON1 and they came back fairly quickly advising me that I had to update my nVidia card driver. I installed a new version dated 08 Aug and this has mostly fixed the issue. Now I only get occasional crashes (and I always save a copy of the file before I resize).

Now the biggie: If you are using the High Quality version and your image has large areas of plain color like an clear blue sky or large area of plain grey or white cloud, the resize will generate smudgy dark vertical banding across the whole area making the image unusable. I have reported this to ON1 and they sent a reply that this is a known problem and they are working on it. link here

Note that I have found that using the tiling> high option that they recommend does not seem to make any improvement.

I am a long-time user of ON1 products (mostly their develop, sharpening, resize and effects modules) so I will continue to use the 2025 resize until these issues are fixed.

 

[compactchris]

Yes I did similar testing with you but did not time as diligently.

I cropped a Ricoh GR3 24meg file to about 4.5 meg and a Fuji X100VI to about 6meg. I then resized them so that they would print to about 16x20. For this I used Epson Print Layout to verify the print-size pixel density was OK

In summary I decided not to upgrade as standard was better but only slightly. ( we had to look hard). The high quality gave odd results including the banding you mentioned.

I am glad I saw your post as I thought that with such indifferent/poor results, I must be doing something wrong.

I will keep my eyes peeled for improvements from ON1