Cannot open TIF file (split)

[wus]

Hi, I'm Wolfgang from Munich, Germany. I like to visit interesting places around the globe and picture them with my cameras. Until now I use CapureOne (c1) to develop my RAWs, and an old PSLE for general image manipulation (not a lot). And sometimes PTGui Pro to create large panoramas or 360° spheres. c1 recently became (more than just a bit) too pricey for me, so I will need an alternative as soon as I buy a new camera that is not supported by my old c1 version. Another reason why I'm looking at Affitniiy is that I want to do focus stacking.

I just downloaded Affinity Photo for test, in the hope it would allow me to do some post-stitching touch-up on a large panorama built with PTGui Pro 11.32. It has 3.8 Gigapixels / 10.5 GB and is in 8 bit tiff format, no alpha channel and no compression. But AP can't open it - it shows "document loading..." for ages, then an error message appears "file type not supported" (in German, see screenshot). According to the appendix, this format should be supported. What's wrong here?

I can open the file with IrfanView (even though it's a rather old version), why can't Affinity open it?

[walt.farrell]

We (or Serif) may need to see the file to see what the problem is. Is it one you can share?

I'm sure it's big enough that you wouldn't be able to upload it here, but Serif will be able to provide a private Dropbox link you could upload it to. Or if you want we forum users to try to help, perhaps you have a cloud service you could upload it to that allows sharing a link with us?

[wus]

Thanks for the quick answer, Walt.

Yes please provide a dropbox link. Make sure it provides enough space - the file size is 10.5 GB.

In the meantime I also learned that AP can also stitch panoramas - but can it stitch such big ones? It's made from 160 single photos each 42 MP, whose RAW file size is ≈ 82 MB each.

[David in Яuislip]

There is a filelimit of 4GB on standard tiffs, there is a 64bit offset variation which PTGUI might be saving but APhoto cannot load
I created a 100000x40000px file in Photoshop, saved it as a psb (6.49GB) which opened in APhoto so I would trying converting your file to psb with imagemagick 

magick yourfile.tiff yourfile.psb

might work

 

edit: I also created a tiff64 file (11.1GB) from the psb. Irfanview opened it, APhoto said File not supported
Try exiftool yourfile.tif. You will see 
File Type                       : BTF
File Type Extension             : btf
MIME Type                       : image/x-tiff-big

if I'm right. Don't use magick yourfile.tif:info as it gets stuck

 

Edited April 11 by David in Яuislip
as noted

[wus]

I created a .psb file of the same size from PTGui now. AP needed about half an hour to open it, but at least it did open it in the end.

IrfanView opens that same file in about 2 min.

Then I tried to mark (select) the sky, because that is what I want to touch up. Again I had to wait about half hour. There is no way (at least no obvious way) to stop the process. All I could do was to wait and pray that it works.

It did eventually work, but it selected parts of the image that I don't want to change.

And then I accidentally clicked the selection away 😩 - beginner's stupidity.

In video editing I use smaller proxies to do what I want to without waiting so long for every step. When I'm done I can render the full res version the same way, which will take long time, but runs automatically. Is there anything like this in Affinity Photo?

 

[walt.farrell]

19 minutes ago, wus said:

Is there anything like this in Affinity Photo?

Not as far as I know.

It's good to know that the PSB approach that David suggested at least physically worked, even if the file size makes it impractical to work with. It's possible you're just exceeding the limits of the software, unless it's something related to your machine specs.

[David in Яuislip]

6 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

unless it's something related to your machine specs.

that'd be my suspicion 
On this pc which is hardly a racing bike, the spec is in my signature, the 100000x40000px psb loads in 2m 30s, ½ hour is unusable
Filling a selection of 32000x16000 with a colour takes 4s

[wus]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

unless it's something related to your machine specs.

That brought a question back to my mind that came up when I first looked up Affinity's technical requirements. It requires (for Windows) hardware accelleration by GPU (graphics adapter supporting Direct3D Level 12.0) and compatible with DirectX 10 or higher.

My machine is a 6 core i7 8700K with 16 GB RAM and a GTX1060 with 6 GB video memory. GPU-Z says it supports DirectX 12_1, but I can't see anything about Direct3D.

Is it sufficient?

Do I need to specifically enable or disable anything? Where/how?

[walt.farrell]

15 minutes ago, wus said:

Is it sufficient?

Well, more RAM would probably be better. Just holding the file in memory will take most of what you have installed.

In the application Settings, under Performance, what does it say about Hardware Acceleration (OpenCL)?

[wus]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

 what does it say about Hardware Acceleration (OpenCL)?

Looks active, see screenshot. Are the others settings there okay or would it speed up things if I reduced Retina Rendering or sth else?

[walt.farrell]

I don't think change changing the other settings would improve things. For an image that size I think you need more RAM, but that's just my guess.

[David in Яuislip]

Back to my 100000x40000 image, 8bit no transparency
100000 x 40000 x 3 / 10^6 = 12000MB
Photo memory limit is 16384
Task manager shows 15981
All good and handled within ram

Add a pixel layer and paint a line from top left to bottom right
Task manager shows >17000 and a lot of disk activity, after 5m or so it settles down at 7705MB
So it looks like some of the image is on disk but I can only assume it's handled by the OS swapfile
There is a PersonaBackstore.dat file at
%LocalAppData%\Temp\Affinity\Photo\1.0
but it's 0bytes

Another consideration is what to do with such a massive image. As a psb it was 6.49GB but that format cannot be exported
As an afphoto it's 788MB but unusable outside Affinity programs
That save caused the task manager to climb back over 17000 where it remains

In a nutshell, once Photo has to lay off data to disk it's game over performance wise

Oops, I saved the afphoto file with the line in it, delete that layer, save again and it's 892MB
Save with new name and it's 777MB.
fwiw I have hardware acceleration off

Good luck in your quest

[R C-R]

7 hours ago, David in Яuislip said:

In a nutshell, once Photo has to lay off data to disk it's game over performance wise

Isn't that at least in part dependent on how much data has to be swapped to disk & what has to be in RAM to do something with the document?

[David in Яuislip]

39 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Isn't that at least in part dependent on how much data has to be swapped to disk & what has to be in RAM to do something with the document?

Dunno how the program works
If there's an image in memory and then there's a command to do something, how Photo decides how much of the image to lay off to disk or whether that's handled by the OS in the swapfile. I suspect that it asks the OS for more memory and the OS says yeah sure but it'll be on the disk
My example of drawing a line on an image that was about as large as the memory could hold caused all sorts of disk thrashing or whatever ssd's do, the fan went nuts anyway
So my simple understanding is that once you're out of ram get some popcorn and be prepared for a long weight (old English industrial joke, sorry)