Affinity Photo choking on big files...

[jmagill]

As a long-time Photoshop jock I’ve been pretty impressed with Affinity Photo (AP), but I’ve run into a real performance problem. While working through the Torres del Paine panorama project in the AP Workbook, the program’s performance has hit a wall and I’m not sure where the problem lies. I stitched the pano but when I tried to select the sky in the resulting file using the Flood Select Tool as instructed, the program choked. I clicked and dragged to the right to try to get the suggested tolerance (15%), then had to wait for the program to catch up (sometimes nearly a minute) while I held the button down (actually my finger on the trackpad) before it displayed the selection as marching ants. In addition, no matter how many times I tried, I would always be under or over 15%. Once the selection was displayed, I tried changing it by adjusting the percentage in the toolbar to no effect. Now, the pano is a  pretty big .tiff file (379.5MB), so I expected that running operations on it are necessarily slower, but too slow to make tools usable is not acceptable, so here’s what I tried to get things into the ‘usable’ range:

1. I closed all apps, ran the ‘First Aid’ operation in Mac’s Disk Utility, then shut down.
2. I rebooted, made sure no other apps were running, then opened AP.
3. I went into Preferences and under ‘Performance’ pushed the RAM Usage Limit to the maximum of 65536MB and the Undo Limit down to 200.
4. I opened the big pano .tiff file and exported it as a .png and a .jpg to see how a smaller file would work.
5. The .jpg file was 147.1MB and .png file was 182.9MB. I decided to give the .png file a try.
6. Performance was only a little better than the .tiff; still frustratingly slow and not yet ready for primetime as far as my work is concerned.
7. I tried again with the smaller .jpg with the same result.

Does anyone have any suggestions to improve performance, or does AP simply have trouble manipulating large files?

Here are the specs on my machine:

MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012) running macOS Catalina v. 10.15.4
Processor: 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
Memory: 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Startup Disk: Mac HD
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1 GB, Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB

 

Thanks for the help!

Jim

[stokerg]

Hi jmagill,

I've not seen any other reports of that chapter being slow for others.

ideally you want to leave the Performance section of Preferences on their default values as confirmed here.  One thing i would recommend checking, on the Performance section of Preferences you have an option for Metal, is that enabled?  If it is, untick it and try working on the file again.  Also on the Performance section, what is the Display currently set to use?

 

[jmagill]

Hi stokerg,

I restored the defaults, though I wish there were a 'restore defaults' button on the Performance panel in Preferences. I had to look at the defaults in ADesigner and APublisher to get the proper values.

Anyway, whatever values I use on the Performance panel (and I experimented with them a lot) I still have no luck. The Flood Select tool is still unacceptably slow, with too little control to be usable.

As a workaround, I used the Selection Brush. With that tool, when I click & drag to select the sky in the pano, I still don't see a real-time selection, and when I release the mouse button there's a delay of about 10 seconds until the marching ants appear. If it doesn't select everything and I have to click & drag to select more of the sky, the same thing happens, but now it's only a delay of about 4 seconds. I also miss having a Tolerance option on the tool's context toolbar, but compared to the 58 seconds the Flood Select tool makes me wait to see the marching ants, the wait-time for the Selection Brush is a little irksome, but now tolerable.

Out of curiosity, I tried using the Flood Select tool on a 300dpi 62MB .aphoto file of my own and it worked perfectly: marching ants in real time. The Selection Brush worked fine also.

So, I thought I'd try it on one of the unstitched Torres source files (DSC6480.tiff) which is also 300 dpi but smaller at 39.7 MB. The problem was back: no marching ants in real time and I had to hold down the mouse button for several seconds for the tool to catch up and show me the correct Tolerance.

Strange.

What is it about those Torres source files?