Hi
I am adding my recent insights to this thread as it is the one I found when I searched on slow HDR Merge, so if you also end up here this might be useful.
I was finding HDR Merge on a MAC unusably slow on a brand new iMac (I gave up timing it because it took so long), so for a while have created TIFFs from C1, then merged in free version of Photomatrix Essentials (fast but very limited), before importing into AP. Far too many steps and I would need to invest in the paid version of PE to make the results sing.
Now that I have gotten around to ordering OWC memory to upgrade from 8GB to 24GB I have tried playing around with AP Preferences with some interesting results. It might be worth trying the same on your machine if you have some headroom on memory. My results summarised here (AP 1.8.3, started application fresh each time and checked stats in Activity Manager):
Machine: 2019 iMAC 27" 3.7GHz, 24GB memory, 1 TB SSD, Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB. No other apps running at the time.
Images: 5 bracketed Sony RAW images, each 50MB (from A7R IV). Settings for image align, ghost removal, noise reduction and tone map.
Then I adjusted the settings for RAM Usage Limit and Disk Usage Warning in Preferences->Performance.
RAM Usage Limit Disk Usage Warning Processing time (mins) Disc write Disc read
Default (8GB) Default (32GB) 29:00 92.9GB 5.9GB
21.5GB Default (32GB) 3:30 4.3GB 250MB
Max setting Max setting 2:00 16KB 104MB
It is clear from the disc activity where the processing time comes from. I am not technical enough to hazard a guess at why with the default settings Activity Manager indicates AP writes about 15 times more data than it reads (that does not sound like the path to wisdom).
Now that I have performance that is manageable I will be doing some comparisons of the results I get with AP, as compared to with my multi-step workflow, and with Aurora HDR.
Mark
