Slow loading of photos

[Bartelmy]

I reported this the other day - it applies equally to Publisher - and has been occurring only for the last few days. Loading of a photo from Faststone (my default image management program) has slowed to a crawl: the container window for Photo opens soon enough but then everything goes to sleep. After a while, the title bar shows the message that Photo has crashed as in the image below. If I click in the empty window, Photo eventually loads up - though very slowly. This is weird - but, more to the point, both Photo and Publisher have become a real pain to get started. As usual, I point the finger at some recent 'improvement' supplied by Microsoft - but freely admit that I really don't know. I should emphasise that both programs have been running well on my Windows 10 setup until the last few days. Bart

 

[Bartelmy]

Updates:

1 - I inadvertently posted my original observation in the Designer forum - I meant to put it in the Publisher forum (sorry).

2 - I seem to have fixed the issue in both Photo and Publisher: I had calibrated my screen using the normal Windows 10 tool and, in the process, had made small changes by weakening the lightest grey value shown on the screen. This improved what I was seeing (to my eyes) but I think that the Affinity programs were struggling to process the calibration settings because, having reverted to standard SRGB settings as my screen default (as opposed to SRGB with calibration), everything has re-normalised - load times have improved considerably.

I am relieved to have removed the crawl when opening files but it is a pity that using screen calibration seems to have unwanted effects - it makes it harder for me to get soft proof settings to generate reliable output simulations for my printers since screen white and paper/card white are more different than they were with the calibration.

Bart

 

[Gabe]

Hi @Bartholomew,

Sorry for the delayed reply. An ICC profile should have caused any slowdowns of the app. 

Can you attach the profile so we can try and replicate it? 

[Bartelmy]

I no longer use the profile and do not have a record of the precise values I was using. However, I always use normal sRGB settings as the device profile (generally sRGB IEC61996-2.1 with the WCS profile for sRGB conditions). I use Relative Colorimetric as my default rendering intent and set all proofing choices to paper/media colour.

The difference here was small but significant: I used sRGB with with display hardware configuration and used the Windows calibration tool to tweak one value: I reduced slightly the setting for the weakest grey value shown in the colour chart. This was an attempt to get screen white closer to paper white since I am finding that the white of the card I use is slightly different from the white of the screen, and this is affecting perceptual output when I invoke soft proofing: the screen value is just sufficiently different from the output to create frustration.

When I ditched the screen calibration and went back to the simple values outlined above, the crawling stopped immediately in both Photo and Publisher - all loading times are normal again.

This might be a peculiarity of my rather elderly and strange graphics card - supposedly a Radeon RX 580 but, in fact, the AMD drivers are hopeless for this card and Windows has automatically loaded the drivers for the Radeon RX 480, with a manufacturer update for this card (the  update has worked). If RX 580 drivers are used, the mouse jumps around with a life of its own - the computer becomes unusable.

Sorry if this is not very helpful but it is the best I can do - and I assure you that the problem emerged only with calibration and disappeared when calibration was ditched (I have not tried again since changing to the 480 drivers).

Bart

 

[Gabe]

I would not be surprised if all this was caused by the strange GPU/driver config. 

[Bartelmy]

I agree - I can think of no other plausible explanation. However, it still leaves me with the problem of matching screen white to media white! That said, the soft proofing is close enough that I can live with the differences.