Game-Changer: Get Telephoto Backgrounds with Wide-Angle Foregrounds!

One of my graphic editing tools that I use with almost every photo I edit is On1 Photo Raw. Like most graphic software companies, each year On1 tries to add a few new features so they can convince photographers to buy the latest version. Well, today I saw this video of a new feature in On1 Photo Raw 2026 that I think is a winner! I love to place interesting objects in my foreground but to get them properly focused and retain a sharp background, I, like most photographers, select a wide-angle lens and use a high F-stop to accomplish this. Although this maximizes depth of field, the short focal length of the lens results in reducing the scale of your background subject substantially. This new feature lets you separate your foreground and background and essentially zoom in as if you photographed the background with a telephoto lens while keeping your foreground at the same scale and sharp. I suspect On1 is leveraging their upscaling/interpolation algorithms from their Resize technology for this new feature. This would address the main concern with this type of effect - maintaining detail and avoiding that "digitally enlarged" look when scaling up the background. The combination of sophisticated masking (to separate foreground/background) plus the high-quality resize algorithms is creating something genuinely useful. It reduces the need for shooting multiple focal lengths and compositing them later to create the same effect.

This product is in pre-order but I'll be anxious to try it out with some of my 16mm wide-angle images to see if it can deal with higher levels of distortion, vignetting, and edge softness that comes with more extreme wide-angle lenses.