Maximum Affinity Photo sizes issues with saving

[Frandango]

Please forgive if this has been answered elsewhere but I have had a good search and the only references I can find relate to Affinity photo on iPad. I am usnig the Affinity suite in Windows and predominantly Photo. I take macro photos and these can be 3-400 images stacked into a single 61megapixel image Tiff. I use Capture One and Helicon Focus for that stage and then use Affinity for the editing. All good and it is easy to work on in Affinity. However when I try to create a mosaic of the images for a high resolution image in total eg butterfly made up of 19x61 megapixel images the application crashes when trying to save the resultant image with the 19 layers. The saved working images are typically 3-6Gig size and 35000x25000pixels or 875MP. Once complete I do merge the layers and do final tweaking that way and thats all fine. Its only when working with the layers that things get sticky as I save that file. I am running an older but still ok workstation with 128gb ram and an older  RTX4000 graphicas card and two 16 core processors so its all ok ( I think ) hardware-wise and it edits fast enough.  I should probably merge layers as I complete them but it is better for me to view the whole image and make subtle adjustments as I go along.  Essentially AITA? (Am I the Ass?) should I change the format of the files I edit? Or should I save in a different non Affinity format? Help and guidance would be much appreciated.

Thanks Francis

Images below are just lower sized .jpg for illustration

[Komatös]

Hi, @Frandango and welcome to the forum.

The maximum image size is 256,000 x 256,000 pixels. Which corresponds to the maximum size of the jpg format. The maximum file size is only limited by the available RAM. The format of the files is secondary, as the data in RAM provides the same image information whether it comes from a jpg or tif file.

The rat tail here could actually be the graphics card, which is certainly not an RTX 4000 (those are yet to come ).

I would like to point out that the live display of (live) filters and effects, especially with such giga-images, increases the occurrence of problems.

[Frandango]

Sorry , my fault , the card is a Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 , which is not especially fast these days , about the same as a 1080. 

That's really helpful as clearly I am not breaching size issues so it then makes me wonder why during the save process Affinity falls over and crashes completely. It should be happy saving in its native format unless there are limitations such as PNG size limits 

 

[NathanC]

Hi @Frandango,

Could you provide us with a crash report from when this has happened as well as the file which causes the crash (if possible)? Below is a private dropbox link if you wish to upload them there.

https://www.dropbox.com/request/nTkNLcmi04uvKVgCCP6z

Info on how to find crash reports is covered in the below thread.

 

 

[NotMyFault]

Your workflow might be too demanding even on powerful systems.

Other users were able to successfully stich gigapixel panoramas with photo.

So principally Photo is capable to do the job, but as others pointed out there are countless obstacles to be tackled:

• you cant do every edit step in one go and full final resolution. You should plan a phased approach. 
• Save file formats wisely (RGB/8 if possible, as RGB/16 doubles storage)
• avoid lengthy edits (files with lots of history), export in flat formats like tiff before stages
• Use the panorama stitching  of Photo, it does a good job to match colors of overlapping areas, avoid manual work

Check your c drive. Affinity requires lots of temp space there during save, even if files are stored on different drives.

Use only internal disks, no nas or usb drives.

 

 

[Frandango]

Thank you all thats all very helpful. I have very much tried to keep the workflow in stages and I guess I could definitely do more to separate that out. I also use internal drives and nvme for the boot with only applications stored there, which may or may not be a good idea. I could temporarily put the working files on a separate internal nvme rather than regular sata drives which may help matters in terms of access. I presume it may be, that having done so much editing it was too much undo information 

 

I am uploading all the dump files but they look like last year when I had similar issues with another file. Affinity Photo just bombed out, there was the save progress bar that completed then it re did the save bar but stopped about half way and then completely bombed out . The file was recoverable but it did say it needed to use a different file. sorry I didn't pay attention to the message as I was too keen to check the file.

[NotMyFault]

On Windows, always have a look at task manager (for CPU, RAM, GPU) and resource manager (for disk activity per process)

When dealing with very large files, affinity could run out of resources either RAM or DISK. When it hangs, sometimes IO is maxed out, and this could take quite some time to finish. Resource Manager can show you the file path (sort by "total io", from max to min)

[NotMyFault]

Did you limit RAM usage in edit>preferences>performance? I would advise to set it to maximum RAM. The OS is better in RAM management than Photo. In rare cases, it can helps to reduce RAM for Affinity by e.g. 8 GB, this leads to more disk IO, but leaves other processes a bit of RAM to run in parallel.

[Frandango]

Yes and thanks and actually that is a great reminder. I will up the disk notification info but I set the RAM limit to 64gig when I installed so that should hopefully be enough as that leaves the other 64 for everything else ( which is generally just the OS and possibly an email client so massive overkill) Good point and I'll go through the settings more carefully to ensure I have tweaked it correctly 🙂 

[NotMyFault]

bad luck Affinity seems to be unable to utilise RAM >64 GB.

when I assume 16 files of 4 bytes per pixel and the given pixel count, the document easily eats 56 GB RAM. Add some edits (copy layer or filter / adjustments layers) and you RAM is over-over-utilized. Use RGB/16 and you are above the limits already when started.

To save, Affinity needs about 100GB storage on c drive. Any questions?

 

 

[Frandango]

Aaaaaaaah that would certainly explain it . So I would be best creating some jpgs and assembling them at much lower res ( just to make sure I have taken all the necessary photos for the mosaic)  and then editing some large Tiffs separately to create parts of the jigsaw and when they have been flattened into single files doing the final merge that way .  That would at least reduce the amount of unseen overlap on the images that would eventually just be removed in the flattening.  Bit of a faff really and would be so much better if Affinity could address more RAM.  Many thanks for your advice it has been illuminating 

[NotMyFault]

Just to confirm - Photo is limited to 64 GB RAM currently

 

[Frandango]

AAAAAAARGH so I was working on another mosaic and had managed to do some really good work on it whilst keeping an eye on ram usage. It was pretty consistently hovering in the 55-60gb mark so I thought I was Ok . I also started using a spare NVMe drive as the scratch and working drive to save to and store the various images to build the mosaic from and ssave the mosaic to. I thought this would fix it, and it did for a less onerous image, but alas it did the old save bar once then halfway through the next run of the save bar it errored and bombed out. No I have a truncated file that won't open  😞  Sadly no crash report either. I may have to go over to the Dark Side 😞