histogram slow or not responding much of the time

[Eric5]

Been working with Affinity Photo latest version for about six weeks now on my Dell XPS 420 desktop with ATI Radeon HD 3870 graphics card.  Aside from the initial frequent crashing and exception errors of the program (which thankfully have been solved by a simple change from a HDD to an SSD drive!), I have a slow or non-responsive histogram much of the time.  Have been trying to work with it, but today it was an issue as a saved Affinity file ended up clipped when opened later.  Any way to remedy this?  I click the yellow triangle, which supposedly refreshes the graph as it would in Photoshop, but nothing usually happens.  Also, I notice better behavior on much smaller files like if I export a large Affinity file to a reduced size jpeg and open later.... the histogram then seems to update most of the time when any actions are done like adding curves or brightness/ contrast.

[Dan C]

Hi Eric5

Thanks for your report, we're aware that our current histogram implementation has a few issues and this has been re-worked for version 1.7, which is currently in beta. You're welcome to download it and give it a go from here!

[Eric5]

Thanks, I may give it a try as, in addition to the slow histogram, the even more serious issue of video card crashing occurred once again. Thought I had it solved, but doesn't appear that way. Is the beta version a separate install from the stable? Serial needed from original installation? Thanks.

[Dan C]

Sorry to hear it! The beta installation is separate from the release build and both can be run simultaneously  
The beta should detect your current installation and product key automatically, but in the rare case it doesn't simply input the key used for the release build!

[Eric5]

Downloaded the beta and tried it out.  Interesting to see some of the changes implemented over the stable AP so far.  Of course, the first thing I did was open the large Affinity multi-layered file and try manipulating the layers while observing the histogram.  Result: seems better than current stable Affinity, but still issues.  It seems to have to do with file size.  The file I tried is like 4 GB.  Anything done with layers was slow histogram response.  I tried checking "layer" option and refreshing (pressing yellow triangle).  I then found that if I did a copy flattened and opened from clipboard to a new file, the histogram response was nearly instantaneous most of the time.  So whatever is happening must have something to do with file sizes as well.           

[Dan C]

Thanks for trying the beta and we appreciate your feedback  I'll make sure our devs are aware of this and hopefully we can fix this in a future build!