Before I buy--a question

[Cofga]

I am working with the free trial ver. 1.6.6 on an iMac with High Sierra, 8 MB RAM and 700MB disk space. When I edit a photo and change something like brighness, contrast, etc. instead of getting a smooth even change in the image, it updates in several blocks usually starting at the center and progressing outwards. Is this normal behavior? if not do I need to change a setting or increase memory, etc.? I have never seen this type of behavior with Photoshop or any other image processing software I have used. 

[IanSG]

That's normal, though I can't say I like it! 

[R C-R]

Which iMac model do you have? What CPU does it have (i5, i7, dual or quad core, etc.)? I assume you mean it has 8 GB (not MB) of RAM, which should be fine for most things, but 700 MB of free (?) disk space if that is what you mean probably is not enough for the OS to run smoothly -- as a very rough rule of thumb, most sources still recommend keeping at least 10-15% of the total disk space free to allow enough room for VM, scratch, & other temporary files & various housekeeping chores the OS does in the background. That is considerably more than is likely ever needed for today's very large drives with capacities in the hundreds of GB & up range, but because some of these files can easily exceed several GB, the absolute minimum of free disk space should never ever drop below 5 GB or so.

 

That said, when running either Affinity app on my relatively low performance iMac (specs below in my sig) I rarely if ever see any blockiness that lasts more than a second or two, & that only for very large or complex documents.

 

If you can, post a screen shot of the Affinity preferences > Performance window. Together with more info about your iMac, that may suggest some changes in those settings that will smooth out the updates.

[Cofga]

Sorry, typing on an iPad is challenging. My iMac is a 27 inch mid-2011, 2.7 GHz Intel Quad I5. It has 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 Ram, about 700GB free disk space. High Sierra 10.13.2.

 

Lateley I was mainly using Photoshop to convert Raw files to jpegs for submission to my publisher so this blocky behavior is not a problem, just something I noticed right away. It is not a pleasant thing to update your OS to High Sierra and suddenly find your old (CS5) version of Photoshop no longer is compatible. But Affinity Photo seems to be a good alternative to Photoshop for my purposes. Maybe in future releases they will figure out how to refresh the images without the blockiness. I can only imagine what it would do with some of my 500 MB photoshop multilayered images. Here is the Performance screenshot.

[Alfred]

32 minutes ago, Cofga said:

My iMac is a 27 inch mid-2011, 2.7 GHz Intel Quad I5. It has 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 Ram, about 700GB free disk space. High Sierra 10.13.2.

 

What GPU does your system have? I notice from your screenshot that it isn't Metal-compatible, which may be why you observe blockiness when large amounts of data are being drawn to the screen.

[Cofga]

AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB. I haven’t changed anything from the default setup, should I?

[v_kyr]

Settings look pretty normal and are as default usually good balaced. When you say ...

Quote

When I edit a photo and change something like brighness, contrast, etc. instead of getting a smooth even change in the image, it updates in several blocks usually starting at the center and progressing outwards. Is this normal behavior?

... do you mean only in the RAW development module or generally here? Meaning does it also behave this way when applying adjustment layers and usual image manipulation tasks in the top left Photo persona mode?

[firstdefence]

@Cofga Hi, I also have a Mid 2011 iMac with the AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB and I have 12 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 but I get the same blocking, It reminds me of the rendering you get from a 3D engine like Cinema 4D when you have things like Ambient Occulsion set.

[Cofga]

So far I have only used the raw developer and that is where I see it. Apparently others have responded that they too see this so I am not alone. Is it due to the AMD Radeon graphics or something else? Over the years I have used a numner of graphics packages from really simple aps to Photoshop and this is the first ime I have seen this effect. It doesn’t even happen on my iPad with the various aps. Of course those are working with jpegs and not raw files.  

[v_kyr]

That's the way it looks here too for the RAW development engine, seems to work like it applies things in layered chunks.