Photo Raw 2021 Performance
I have experienced performance issues when running Photo Raw 2020.5 on Windows 10. Despite raising support cases these were never resolved, and I have actually rolled back to 2020.1. I see from other posts that I am not alone in having these problems.
I notice that version 2021 is due to be released next month. I wondered if anybody had been a tester or beta user. If so, are you able to comment on the performance of the new version on Windows. This information would help me make a decision to upgrade, which at the moment, I see as a big risk to stability and performance.
Thanks.
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EDL,
No power problems with that card! ;-)
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Ok, thanks!
Even if a bit cumbersome and not for everyone, I think I understand everything!
Anyway I hope for some improvements with the new version.
Thank you all.0 -
I'm avidly following this new thread as I'm still concerned about Photo Raw 2020 performance. I notice that one of the competitors has a feature chart showing 5 leading photo editing programs and PR is listed as "very slow". And they are the only one.
Recently I added a Radeon RX 580 and that has made the program at least usable for my purposes. See below for the improvements that yielded.
I am skeptical about adding an SSD drive for the cache. I have my photo library on a second 7200 RPM WD drive and the Cache sits on a hybrid C: drive. So the cache has its own channel. And I don't now see the hard drive as a bottleneck on Task Manager. (It is important though to make sure the hard drive is quiet before loading Photoraw and that can take 10 minutes with Windows 10 or longer in the week after a new release has been installed.)
Here is the before/after on my benchmark. Before I was using built-in Intel graphics. 'After' is with the Radeon RX 580. Note that Photo Raw has been identified to the graphics card as a 'high performance' app.
Load ON1 Photo Raw. Before 50 seconds. After 30 seconds. Just after adding full catalog - 90 seconds. Exit and restart - under 30 seconds again.
I used a test folder with 9 CR2 photos, 6-10 megabytes each, no catalogue. Film strip view.
Select all 9 photos (with control-A). Before 30 seconds. Now 7 seconds.
Arrowing through 9 photos. Ok both times.
Switch to edit mode, then back to browse, deselect all. Before 30 seconds. Now 10-15 seconds.
Arrowing now a bit slow.
Back to edit mode. Select all. Set AI exposure on first photo, then copy and paste that change to the other 8 photos.
Before 20-30 seconds. Now 10 seconds.
While doing this work, there is little load on the CPU or the hard drive. The delays seem to be related to use of the GPU and processing of the photo edit stack. The way I picture this is that the program is storing the original photo and re-applying the photo edit stack at various points, and not doing that as efficiently as possible.
With the photo library catalogued, including this test folder, the benchmark delays disappear. However, just flipping between browse and edit modes, deselecting and selecting all, with the occasional arrow or single picture select will cause inexplicable 30 second delays, sometimes with the hourglass, sometimes without. At the time of delay, the graphics card is being used. This indicates a software design problem because no graphics work needs to be done through these moves, especially if catalogue previews are utilized. It looks like the catalogue previews are being used to reduce processing of the photo edit stack, but not always.
I'm going to stick with the program for now because it can do all the batch moves I require to digitize my slide collection, and that is very impressive. But I hope ON1 is not going to just keep adding features without improving the speed or doing some much needed code optimization. I'm also leery of any new release that might deprecate performance. Adding features with abandon tends to do that over time.
I know that getting sales is driven by features. However, when the program has an entry cost of under $100, people will abandon it just as quickly if it does not do the fundamentals well. And it should do the basics without a $500 hardware performance upgrade. That is what scares me about this program.
2020.5 is a very good release in terms of features and user interface design. Some software companies will maintain a stable release where they work hard on bug fixes and performance, and a beta release with new features. In fact, Lightroom has done just that, though they don't tell you. Microsoft did that back when we had NT workstation versus Windows 98. This is something I think ON1 should look at. The needs of a casual photographer editing 3 photos of his kids, and a prosumer photographer are very different.
As a long time software developer I never go to a new release unless forced to. Ran Windows XP for the longest time while people suffered through Windows 8, et cetera. I hate the continuous updates of Windows 10, and you would not believe how Microsoft has destabilized their corporate Windows Server base with automatic updates.
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Henry Slofstra, would be nice if you share the link of the competitor so we can also look at that. ON1 is slow by comparison to all the other similar software I have or have tried so far, given the same image set and system. Yes, there are fundamental issues with ON1 even after previews are built. For example, view (E) or edit (D) any image. You will see a progress bar at the bottom loading the actual raw file (60 MB in my case). Now, if you cancel out of let us say edit, you will get a prompt saying that you will lose all edits even when you did nothing. This implies that the state of the edit and the undo stack is dis-jointed and unknown. But, go ahead and okay that. Now, if you go back to edit, the file is re-loaded again even though nothing was done on the image. The same happens if you reset the image.
There are similar fundamental issues. Another example is if you check the cache files for ON1. If you attempt to catalog around 100k files, the previews in the cache will be over a million files. The ON1 uninstaller, at least on the mac, does not even touch any of these files. ON1 support has a separate app to delete these files since it can take quite some time just to delete them.
Even on a 10-year-old system, PS still flies by comparison in any comparable operation. So, yes, ON1 is slow and has fundamental flaws.
The lure of the hybrid LR+PS nature and features in ON1 is huge for most. Let us hope ON1 wakes up to fix the basic issues soon.
As a side note, I tried a side profile in the all-new Portrait AI and it got every area automatically detected incorrectly. Luminar 4 gets all of that absolutely correctly. Once again...Not tested I guess...About to send this report to support...
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Personally, I find the comparisons that describe how program X, Y or Z perform much better than On1 a bit absurd. Any competitors comments on Performance on any product also needs to be taken with a HUGE grain of salt.
These are different programs that although do similar things none do them the same way. On1 has it's issues and isn't perfect but go to user forums of other programs and you will also find a bunch of posts from folks describing bugs etc. No piece of software is perfect.
There are also massive system differences and when I look at Henry's post I can say that my experience is much different and this is probably due to system configuration, I also am running a relatively clean install of Windows ( about 3 months old ) which I think often helps take care of many issues sometimes found on Windows machines.
For example for me using CR2 images that are 30 to 40 MB.
Select 77 images in filmstrip view with control+A all images selected almost immediately.
I won't go through all of his examples but can say the results on my machine are much faster than his.
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Henry, if the program's scratch space is on the C: drive it cannot possibly have a dedicated I/O channel as the operating system with its own swap space is using that drive too. Do you have an email program running in the background downloading email while you're working in ON1? All that I/O is happening on the C: drive. Is your web browser open to some page that updates in the background? More C: drive I/O.
The point in moving the ON1 Scratch space to its own dedicated DRIVE is to insure that no other I/O is taking place on that channel while you are editing.
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Returning to my original subject, here is an update. To summarise first, the inconsistency and confusion continues...
I went through all of the technical suggestions received and found only one change was necessary which was to add the Browser Cache as an exclusion for AV scans. I can't imagine this will make much difference as the scans will not always be running when I am using PR. I then prepared for adding an external SSD. First I updated the graphics driver to the latest version and then, with baited breath, updated PR to 2020.5 (v. 9231). It is worth adding that the graphics driver was only released yesterday, so this obviously would not have been installed when I originally ran into problems with 2020.5.
Much to my surprise the new PR version, so far, has run without any problems!!! I gave it a good test by adding lots of Effects and Local Adjustments to a RAW file, mostly with masks. I also then used the Perfect Eraser (something I would normally do before adding the adjustments). While PR then slowed a little this could probably be expected, but it was still perfectly usable. Response times during "normal" levels of editing are good. This was totally different to my previous experience of 2020.5.
While it is great that PR is working well right now, my confidence levels are still low regarding future stability...
Adding an external SSD is postponed for now because there is currently nothing to speed up.
Finally, my request to On1 Sales for an update on the progress of bugs and performance issues in v.2021 ended up with the Support Team who just gave a completely non-committal "We are working on improvements with ON1 PHOTO RAW 2021".
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Roger,
I have never sat out a new version because I have been chasing "performance improvements" with every new version but I will be sitting this one out for now. I suspect that 2020 is almost being dismissed for any updates since 2021 is being launched next month - I don't know that for sure. It would be nice since the backbone of the program is probably the same that performance issues would get tweaked for older versions to give those who bought the program and need it to be tweaked. I hope I'm wrong with my suspicions.0 -
Henry,
I have a RX 580 as well and if you go into the Radeon desktop part and go to games you can point it to have ON1 use it for things.
I kind of tried to duplicate what you did. ON1 booted up in about 25 seconds so similar to you. I went into a cataloged file with raw images and I put the images on single view full screen and scrolled using the arrow keys on top and there was about a 1/2 second delay every time the image changed. I selected one image and synced 8 others with auto AI and it was instantaneous. Back and forth from browse to edit with auto AI and back maybe 2 seconds. But every computer is set up differently.0 -
Vinny,
Thanks for doing that. Have you put the cache and catalogue on their own SSD drive? And were the photos catalogued?
The one difference I can see is that I was using film strip view combined with a single image. Also, after I catalogued my library the general performance was much better although the program didn't always go to the catalogue when I thought it should.
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Nitin,
Regarding the speed comparison I didn't feel it was fair to name the competitor directly on the On1 site. So I screen snipped a bit of the comparison which gives you at least some information. There are two slow programs. Obviously the author of the screen is the 'Fastest'. Two others are conceded to be 'Fast'. And one is 'average'. So there is room for improvement.
This isn't definitive by any means, but this is what the competition is hitting ON1 with. And yes, I realize there are many other aspects to the decision than performance.
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Henry,
Yes my photos are cataloged and no I don't have a seperate scratch disk but after this conversation I may try a USB 3 thumb drive as a scratch disk to see if it works. The catalog I don't think works like a LR catalog and ON1 just generates previews and all the info resides in the folder the photo was stored. If you use windows explorer and unhide hidden files you will see the files associated with the original image.
I believe ON1 goes to the last place you were in so if you went to your desktop and looked or processed a photo there next time it starts there. But it is a simple matter of just going to the top on the left hand side and clicking on the catalog ( I think thats it I'm not in front of it) and you are taken there immediately. The program is kind of slow during the initial catalog process but speeds up tremendously after it. Best advice I heard was to start cataloging before you go to sleep.
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I was wrong Henry, ON1 does save a preview of the cataloged file and that location can be changed in preferences.
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What the Preferences allow you to change is the location for the PerfectBrowseCache which is what the catalog builds. It contains the preview images for the Browser to display. Even without Catalogs the PBC will be built as you browse to different locations.
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Hi Henry Slofstra...Was just curious since there are not too many applications that you can compare ON1 with...IMO, it can be compared with LR, C1 and Exposure. Luminar is not a DAM and therefore not a real comparison like some of the others.
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Hi Nitin, It's not any of those. I will go so far as to give you one hint. They are on a 'Highway to Hell'.
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Vinny,
I did point the graphics card at ON1 Photo Draw as a 'game' and that helped that much more again. Response time is reasonably good. I can turn clipping on and off, which wasn't even possible in the original benchmark. Copy and paste AI enhance across the 9 photos and then switch back to manual, et cetera.
It's a bit odd though. When I play idly with the settings, copy-paste using select all, view clipping and arrow through the pictures, there will be occasional hourglass delays, sometimes without hourglass, and sometimes a 'save settings' progress bar comes up.
Switching between browse and edit really throws the program for a loop. It's like it is processing the photo edit stack all over again.
I was inspecting the browse cache, and I can't see it serving any purpose in filmstrip mode. It saves some small JPGS in the cache. Great in grid view I guess, but when I work with a hundred new photos, I want to see them in a decent size, maybe view clipping and because I'm bracketing all the shots, quickly pick the best exposures I'm going to work with.
It appears to use a hashing algorithm where it precreates a zillion folder names, then hashes to a folder for quick access. That should be done into a database not into a file system. Pretty awful. I have kept the cache to 1000 MB because at larger settings it creates a ridiculous number of these folders.
I also have not seen any sign of the catalogue.
I can buy a dedicated 1 TB SSD drive for about $75 Canadian. I would do that, but what is it actually going to do for me functionally?0 -
Brian, I appreciate your helpful advice, but I still don't have a complete visualization of what's going on with the cache/ catalog.
Here is what you wrote:
What the Preferences allow you to change is the location for the PerfectBrowseCache which is what the catalog builds. It contains the preview images for the Browser to display. Even without Catalogs the PBC will be built as you browse to different locations.
The cache seems to contain a JPG for whatever photos you look at. That way, when you browse back to that image, it's already built as per the edit stack. I understand that, but it is such a small JPG, which would only be usable in a grid. I'm not going to use grids with small images all that much when I first load in a new set of images. Maybe to do a find of something but that's about it.
Your comment seems to indicate that cataloguing is over and above caching, but I have turned on cataloguing for the entire photo library and don't see any sign of the catalogue. What am I missing?
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You're not missing anything Henry. Building the PBC is only part of what cataloging does. The actual catalog is a database, stored in your user directory, but I don't know exactly which file(s) are involved.
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Henry,
We do not have to catalog our photos as people do in Lightroom. You can just have your files stored wherever and go to them.
The cache of the photo is a JPEG representation of the raw photo I believe, Brian seems to have a better handle on the cache and scratch disk then I do.Here's what I believe cataloging can do for us which Brian touched on - it can search! So if you: like, star, color code or keyword the photo RAW will be able to find it. If you have photos in various drives on your computer and catalog them all RAW will do all the heavy lifting in finding them. I haven't used it like this but lets say you want all photos taken with a 50mm lens, I believe RAW will find them in the cataloged files.
I haven't witnessed the program acting screwy when I go from browse to edit with my new computer but I did have issues with a lot of things on my old computer. My suggestion is to turn on Task Manager and play around with ON1 and watch your system resources. My last computer was an older 4 core I5 with 16 GB memory and a lower end 2 Gb graphics card and at times the program along with other programs that may have been running would use 99% CPU along with 80% GPU at the same time. I would get "RAW not responding" if I did masking, had to wait about 5 seconds for the photo to snap back - it was awful! I don't see anything like that now. BTW, when I was looking for a new computer the most important thing for me was general multitasking and multicore performance on the CPU so I opted for a AMD Ryzen CPU - every system in Windows can be different and I for one did not believe my old computer was the issue as it ran everything else lightning fast.
Something that wasn't said and should be is file size. I have a 24 Mpix camera and a 12 Mpix camera. The 12 Mpix file is much smaller and loads up a little quicker. I would hate to see what it would be like with a 50 or 60 Mpix camera.
Also, one last thing (is there such a thing :-) ) - if you haven't tried it, uninstall ON1 and reinstall. I have found that sometimes upgrading is not 100% good and reinstalling is the solution. ON1 has a script for removing it from your computer, Here's the link: https://on1help.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206500417-Uninstall-the-ON1-Software-Products?fbclid=IwAR0G_d2VZDn0e0dkr7sQ2PAB1lyGBx_dgULALW7aPg0Ix1RUB2E7GtIKD20I would also suggest using "CCleaner" to clean up your registry after deleting, I have done it twice in a row and it has found remnants of ON1, reboot before installing. Tech support used to say to install the program as an administrator and to turn your anti virus off so I still do it.
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Nitin,
In 2017 I tried almost every photo program and everyone had it's strengths and weaknesses. Luminar was a joke. I hated the Corel product. ACDsee was powerful but very strange to use, Topaz was supposed to be similar to ON1 - nope, Alien Skin (now Exposure was a very nice product but it wasn't as powerful as ON1. I didn't try Capture 1 because of the expense but since then they have come out with 3 manufactures breakout products and I own a Nikon and just bought then latest version. I own DXO, Affinity, C1 and ON1. Out of all of them ON1 does the most in the easiest way. Back in 2017 after trying all the products I said - 2018 was launched and I came back to ON1 because IMO it did what I wanted and needed.
I wasn't using the DAM (still don't in it's full capacity), don't really need the power of Affinity or PS and DXO has the best lens profiles to date and had the best (or maybe 2nd best) noise reduction out there.
Marketing is a funny thing with every company, they tout a lot about things but generally it may not be what that are saying is 100% true.0 -
I have found the comparison from the competitor whose full product is Windows only, nothing about "Is Mac version available" in comparison.
The performance comparison is for exporting, not the full use of the product. While On1 exporting is slow it can be done in the background. Also I have been using minimising going out to finally get round to really understand Photoshop, if I edit a photo and then save Tiff or PSD it take 30 seconds to a minute to make the save, so Photoshop is not fast either.
I am not sure that some of the things that the table says On1 doesn't have are actually missing from On1, just done differently. For example the table says On1 doesn't have Adjustment Layers, but surely Local Adjustments and Filters are the On1 of doing the same thing. Likewise it says selective sharpening is not available but can use Sharpen filter and mask in as required.
I am sure the table is legit under Trades Description Act but as the saying goes it is a bit economical with the truth.
Anyway as a Mac user I am cut off from most of the things that it says On1 can't do, and can do most of those in On1 anyway.
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David,
The product you are talking about has "adjustment layers" and yes we have similar as well in ON1. The difference is they at times use traditional destructive layering vs non destructive. Just my opinion but almost every program out there can almost due what the others do to a certain degree. ON1 can't do things that Affinity can do but it does things Affinity can do but easier IMO. I am starting to use C1 in developing because it has finer adjustments then every other program but it can't do nearly as much as ON1.
Advertising is just that, stretch the truth a little or a lot. ON1 has also done some stretching as well. ;-)0 -
I continue to work along with ON1 Photo Raw. Recently, I removed cataloguing entirely after a dismal session trying to edit 6 photos of a new puppy dog that our son and his wife have obtained. Somehow a photo shifted sideways (in filmstrip review) and I couldn't seem to do anything to get it centred. I even deleted all the sidecar files, without effect. So that's the end of cataloguing for me.
In a recent session with the Task Manager open, I noticed there was a spike in Ethernet activity every 2 to 3 seconds. The Processes tab indicated that the network/Internet traffic was coming from ON1 Photo Raw. So I disabled the network port, and lo and behold, the intermittent delays as I browsed photoes disappeared. Just a coincidence? I reenabled the network port, and the traffic spikes cam back, along with the intermittent delays. I hope that PR isn't sending user experience data back to the publisher. Anyone have any insight? I'm going to experiment with this further in future sessions.
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There is a known issue with the program checking the 360º service servers every few seconds even for those who have not subscribed to the service. This is supposed to be fixed in the next update.
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I too used to have difficulties with Catalogues. Fundamentally, there was not anything wrong with Photo Raw. It was my hard drive that was forming a bottle neck. I upgraded to an SSD and the catalogues now work perfectly.
I am concerned to hear about deleting ON1 files, as that is where the edit data is stored. If you delete your ON1 files, then you have just deleted your edits.
The spikes of internet traffic is as Brian says, a 'known issue'. It really does appear to be only PR trying to connect to 360, being told 'no your owner has not paid for the cloud subscription', then trying again, and again, and just not giving up. Generally not a problem, as I connect via uncapped broadband. But, it does eat up the data if I connect via my phone, such as in a hotel. So I am looking forward to seeing it fixed. :-)
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The .on1 file implementation has a serious bug David Price. You have an option in preferences to turn it off which implies that edits would be saved in the catalog. That does not work for now. Already a reported and known issue.
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I was not aware of ON1 saying anything to imply that edits were stored anywhere other than where ON1 says that they are stored, (i.e. The edit data is stored in the ON1 Files). If you delete your ON1 files, then you have deleted your edits.
When you create a catalogue, the edits remain in the ON1 files. If you start to delete files from the catalogued folders, you will change the catalogue. And, if you delete all of your ON1 files in a catalogued folder, then you have just deleted all of your edits.
If you deliberately delete your edits, then this is not an example of a bug, it is an example of 'operator error'.
Do not forget that Photo Raw is designed to work without cataloguing. Cataloguing makes Browse run faster and smoother, but you do not have to catalogue if you do not want to and/or need to.0 -
Page 206 of the manual David Price.
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Sidecar Options
Click this box if you wish ON1 Photo RAW 2020 to create ON1-specific ‘sidecar’ files when you are editing images. This is helpful if you are using the same image library with multiple computers (on an external hard drive, for example), and want your edits to be visible on each machine.
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.on1 files are not required unless you want to see the edits on multiple systems.
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As we have both read the User Guide, we both know that ON1 does not actually say that ".ON1 files are not required unless you want to see the edits on multiple systems."
The fact remains that the ON1 file, that sits alongside a raw file, is where the edits are stored.
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