LAAAAAAAAAG with RAW imports

[PeeCeeJunior]

I'm making the transition from Lightroom to Affinity and I'm seeing really bad lag when trying to import RAW images taken with my Fujifilm X-H1. Like the whole computer stops responding, the CPU maxes out, and at one point I had to force reboot because I couldn't even kill the photo editor process. This is on a 2016 MBP with 8gb of RAM that runs Adobe products fine. I've tried both Affinity's RAW engine as well as the Apple one (X-H1 isn't listed under Affinity's for support, but it is supported by the Apple engine). 

Yes, I understand trying to import 2 dozen 20mp RAW images was probably a bad idea. But even importing a single image is taking over 1 minute on a class 10 SDcard connected over TB3. That's bananas. I don't see a lot of other people complaining about this so I'm just curious if it is normal? I've had issues with Fuji's RAW format causing problems in the past. I tried converting the RAF format to DNG first and that was marginally faster, but still really slow.

I know this is a $50 program. I'm trying to temper my expectations. This is slooooow, though.  

EDIT: further investigation shows speeds are about twice as fast when pulling RAF files from the internal SSD rather than a SDcard, so Class 10 be damned, that's part of the bottleneck. It took 40 seconds to import/develop one image with the CPU maxed out the whole time. Still, that's probably within usable specs. 

Edited April 21, 2019 by PeeCeeJunior

[firstdefence]

Have you tried looking at Rawtherapee to give a comparsion. I personally know a lot of pro photographers and the Mac boys swear by Photo Mechanic to process their images.

[HVDB Photography]

Did you try the latest 1.7. bèta

Significant performance improvements 
Hopefully fixes issues related to performance degradation over time

- Tone Mapping a 20MP image is now 10x faster
- Opening ten 20MP CR2 files is now 3x faster
- Developing a 20MP image is now 2x faster
- Complicated documents are much more responsive
 

[R C-R]

15 hours ago, PeeCeeJunior said:

I've tried both Affinity's RAW engine as well as the Apple one (X-H1 isn't listed under Affinity's for support, but it is supported by the Apple engine). 

I am a bit confused by what you mean here. Are you saying that these files can't be opened at all using the Affinity engine, that both engines will open them & have about the same lag problems, or that one engine is less laggy than the other?

Apple's engine is built into the OS, so there is not much if anything Affinity can do to improve its performance -- only Apple can do that.

[lepr]

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[PeeCeeJunior]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

I am a bit confused by what you mean here. Are you saying that these files can't be opened at all using the Affinity engine, that both engines will open them & have about the same lag problems, or that one engine is less laggy than the other?

Apple's engine is built into the OS, so there is not much if anything Affinity can do to improve its performance -- only Apple can do that.

There is no difference in speed. I noticed somewhere else a suggestion was made to try Apple's RAW engine instead of Affinity's. While Affinity doesn't list my model as supported, I imagine it's similar enough to every other Fuji camera to not matter. 

I will have to try the new beta and see if that's better. I'll also give Photo Mechanic a try, but I was hoping to spend less money not more. :)

[R C-R]

7 minutes ago, >|< said:

The bottleneck is in Affinity software; Preview uses the Apple raw engine to generate an image far more quickly than AP Develop.

True, but Preview doesn't provide any significant pre-development editing capabilities -- in fact, on my iMac if I open Tools > Adjust Color with a RAW file open in Preview, I get the spinning beach ball cursor for several seconds before Preview finally tells me it does not support editing RAW files, & it takes another second or two after clicking the "Undo Changes" button for the file to 'revert' to the changes it could not make in the first place. Overall, this takes about the same time as opening the file in Affinity Photo's Develop persona. 

So while Preview does generate the RAW image much faster, it seems to do at the expense of eliminating support for almost everything besides exporting to some other format. Maybe there is no a way to avoid whatever bottlenecks support for that would incur?

[Sharkey]

Is this just the continuation of AP not being able (fast) in handling Rafs?

It has  improved in Beta but is still not got that develop time down to where my old canon/nikon files where. They were larger file too.

The Apple Engine is certainly usable especially for the non-pro but I would bulk at developing 100s of Rafs if I was still working to a schedule.

Not being a digital-genius I really have no idea why this particular raw file type causes so much difficulty. Even 'Silky Pics' is difficult to watch churning through 5 or 6 images.

The only time I have seen the develop process really fly was using the X-t2 to develop the images in camera. Very fiddly but fast.

Ah well perhaps a huge jump in computing power will help after this weeks lottery .  Bet the canon/nikon file will still be faster

[lepr]

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[R C-R]

1 hour ago, >|< said:

I get instantaneous responses and no beachballing or waiting for more than a small fraction of a second with Preview ...

What version of Preview are you using? I'm using version 10.0 on High Sierra. On my iMac (specs in my sig) it takes between about 0.5 & 2.5 seconds to open a RAW file preview image, depending on the file size & RAW format. It takes about the same amount of time to show a preview in Finder's 'Get info' window.

Also, Preview opens all RAW files as 'Locked' in the title bar, even though they are not locked in Finder's Get Info & I have full read/write access to them. Clicking on the title bar Locked icon to open the popup menu to untick the "Lock" checkbox or attempting to make any adjustments in the Tools > Adjust Color window results in a message like this one:

It is the same message for all RAW formats I have tried, including samples from various Nikon cameras with the nef extension, cr2 from canon, orf from Olympus, & so on.

1 hour ago, >|< said:

Same story with Apple Photos - instantaneous responses...

I'm using version 3.0. Once Photos initializes (which takes up to 10 seconds or so), RAW files already imported into its Library appear almost instantly, as does any other image filetype. But that is because Photos generates & caches 3 sizes of jpeg previews on import, named with fullsizeoutput, thumb, & mini in their file names (the first in subfolders in resources > media > version & the other two in subfolders in resources > proxies > derivatives in the .photoslibrary container file), so it is not generating the previews on-the-fly like in Preview.

When I first import a RAW file into Photos, there is a lag while these cached previews are being generated, & much like in Preview, this process takes up to 3-4 seconds, again depending on file size & RAW format.

The lag is shorter than with Affinity Photo, but it is always longer than a small fraction of a second.

[lepr]

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