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Posted

(I originally posted this in the Affinity on Desktop Questions forum, but it occurred to me this might be the better forum for it. Please excuse the redundancy)

 

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

Posted

Ad 6/7) file type (TIFF, PNG, JPG) it does not affect the processing of custom image data. The file is only used to store image data (loss/lossless), but Affinity always works with full information/quality.

If you want to speed up the application (reduce its memory requirements), reduce the processed images - reduce them resolution (number of pixels) or color depth.

Affinity Store (MSI/EXE): Affinity Suite (ADe, APh, APu) 2.5.7.2948 (Retail)
Dell OptiPlex 7060, i5-8500 3.00 GHz, 16 GB, Intel UHD Graphics 630, Dell P2417H 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 24H2, Build 26100.2605.
Dell Latitude E5570, i5-6440HQ 2.60 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics 530, 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 24H2, Build 26100.2605.
Intel NUC5PGYH, Pentium N3700 2.40 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics, EIZO EV2456 1920 x 1200, Windows 10 Pro, Version 21H1, Build 19043.2130.

Posted

#3 was very likely a misstep.  Setting the RAM usage limit higher than the physical memory on your computer is more likely to slow things down than to speed them up.

 

Instead of saving in another non-native format, save as a native Affinity document - do a SAVE not an EXPORT - and work from that.  Do the EXPORT of the final product when you are finished.

 

Under Preferences -> Performance, try:

  • Reduce the RAM Usage Limit below the 8 GB of physical RAM you have (try 7 GB for example).
  • Toggle the checkbox to enable metal compute if it is available.  If things get slower, switch it back.
  • Change the "Display" setting: if it is on OpenGL, try Metal; if it is on Metal, try OpenGL.  If things get slower, switch it back.
Posted

fde1:

Thanks for the tip about setting RAM usage below the physical memory. I lowered it and the tool works a little better now, but it's still abysmally slow. Hardware acceleration is enabled for metal computing but it's not an option for the display. I tried things with metal enabled and without and there was little change in performance. 

It's curious to me that, while the other operations on this file in the tutorial are a little slow but work within the tolerances I'd expect for a file of this size, when using the Flood Select tool the program just hits a wall. And because it happens while working through a tutorial project from the workbook Affinity publishes, using files they supply, I feel like they wouldn't put it out there if it were a speed problem in the application, which is why I've been assuming it's a problem on my end. But unless someone can point to the issue on my machine, I'll start wondering again if the problem's in Affinity Photo...

Also, regarding the file format, I'd been working with the aphoto file originally when I encountered the problem. I only tried the other formats to see if they were any better.

Thanks for the advice. I'm hoping someone from the Affinity team can respond...

 

Posted

Changing filetype should not matter, internally Photo still works like using .afphoto file. 

8 GB is a bit low RAM for big project but maybe someone can check if it should be enough for mentioned project. (I have also mid-12 MBP but 13" so I have upped RAM to 16 GB ages ago...)

Posted
On 4/9/2020 at 4:00 AM, Fixx said:

8 GB is a bit low RAM for big project

I've also been wondering about this.

 

On my Mac Affinity Photo was taking up roughly 686 MB of RAM with no document open.

Opening a 49 MB TIFF file spiked that to 853 MB, an increase of nearly 200 MB.

If the OP has a 380 MB TIFF, rounding up to 400 MB times 4 gives about 1.6 GB of memory usage, so figure on over 2 GB of memory usage for Affinity Photo - as a starting point.  Add the OS plus disk cache to that, and even with nothing else running, I suspect 8 GB is enough to function, but may be a bit constraining, particularly if more layers are added.

 

To @jmagill: close all applications you don't need, then open Activity Monitor (under /Applications/Utilities) and go to the Memory tab.

While using Photo and experiencing the slow performance, check the "Swap Used" along the bottom of that Memory tab - if that number is significant then your computer is probably suffering due to low system memory.

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