AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

From RAW conversion to image editing and printing
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Dr. Harout
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by Dr. Harout »

Henry, I was just kidding. I knew what UI stood for, though not sure about the G. So had to check...
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mikeriach
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by mikeriach »

bfitzgerald wrote:LR 4.1 is a bit better than the 4.0 version which suffered from slowness esp moving between modules. It's not there yet though
I'm running a new build PC quad core 16Gb ram and it's not that fast. I've run LR on some boy racer computers too and it's still not really quick (quicker to export but it's just not optimal right now)

Maybe LR5 will use GPU acceleration, but I think the problems are not PC hardware but lack of optimal code from Adobe.
Please have pity on me running it on an i3 laptop with 4gb ram :(

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bakubo
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by bakubo »

mikeriach wrote:Please have pity on me running it on an i3 laptop with 4gb ram :(
See my post in this thread from a few days ago. I was also running LR 4.1 on an i3 laptop with 4gb. Worked okay. I decided that since it was so cheap that I would upgrade it to 8gb though.
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UrsaMajor
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by UrsaMajor »

bfitzgerald wrote:Maybe LR5 will use GPU acceleration, but I think the problems are not PC hardware but lack of optimal code from Adobe.
Adobe made major changes in the processing algorithms between Version 3.x and 4.x that provide visibly better results, especially with images that have exposure issues. However, these came with a price in terms of the necessary computation. One of the people involved with that development has written that the initial coding of PV2012 required about one minute of processing per megabyte of file size - which would be 20 minutes for a change to a typical A700 file - and that it took them months of work to get the speed to its current level.

Personally, I find the speed visibly slower than LR version 3.x, but still quite livable with my A700 files, and I am running a four-year-old Core 2 Duo PC with 4GB of memory. If and when some kind soul gives me an A99, I may have to think about upgrading my PC hardware. :wink:

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bakubo
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by bakubo »

I have been using LR 4.1 with 18mp raw files (Canon 60D) and 16mp raw files (Olympus E-M5 and Panasonic G3). The speed is adequate on my computer. Of course, faster is always welcome. I don't do batch processing though so I can't say how that is.

By the way, I played around with a couple of old A700 raw files from when I was in Wyoming in 2009. Blue skies, ISO 160, ETTR, often had bad noise in the red channel when converted with ACR. Converting to B&W resulted in terrible skies so I had to turn the skies almost black to hide the red channel noise. I tried LR 4.1 and it seems to do much better.
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bakubo
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by bakubo »

One thing I meant to mention before, but forgot, is that the LR 4.1 performance is adequate on my computer as long as I do not use luminance noise reduction. If I change the luminance noise reduction slider from zero LR slows down a whole lot and the screen doesn't get updated quickly. Gets very jerky and very slow and painful to use. If I need this NR then I wait until the last step to change the value from zero so that it doesn't affect my other operations on the photo.
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bfitzgerald
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by bfitzgerald »

The i3 isn't bad for a notebook processor (we've come quite a long way since the first mobile pentiums) I have one myself not bad really.
I built the quad core 16Gb pc last year, to a sensible but fairly meaty spec. IMO LR 3 was def quicker in every way, yes I think LR4.1 is improved over 4.0, but it's a bit on the slow side. I could of course update the quad core AMD to an 8 core FX (piledriver) in a few months assuming AMD have worked some of the kinks out.
It will be faster, but having run it on some quite beefy i5's and i7's it's still not what I would call "fast" on any of them.

Maybe LR5 will optimise things even more, we will have to wait and see.
agorabasta
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by agorabasta »

We can't expect any speedups with further developments. There's simply too much that can be done to the image processing that is not being done now due to computing power limitations.
What we've seen with the Lr4 being slower than Lr3 was caused by the automatic CA correction in Lr4 - all those on-the-fly geometry calculations are quite demanding.

The next step would be to abandon completely any discrete demosaicing and treat the sensor response as per specific discrete PSF's (Point Spread Functions) to restore and quantify the incident integral wavefront action at the sensor surface. That's essentially a deconvolution process applied to a discrete Bayer (and then maybe non-Bayer) array response. Then the same approach may be taken to all the lens-induced distortions, e.g. applying different deconvolution corrections to the colour planes would help correct LoCA without dumb defringing. Then we may get corrections for the blurred areas of the image to make the mirror lenses produce the blur of the STF quality... Etc.

There's a lot of things that may and will be done once computing power allows, but it's for quite some time into the future that our computers will continue being too slow to do it all.
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bfitzgerald
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by bfitzgerald »

As I said previously it is not always hardware that is weak, but software can at times not be very optimal.
Some of these modern processors have serious firepower, very little is actually demanding any more. About the only thing that does still tax processors is heavy rendering work, video and photo stuff is not really comparable to this. Even a budget pc today can do video encoding quite quickly, the majority of tasks most will use a computer for a not that taxing on the processor.

So it's really partly down to Adobe who don't really have a track record for highly optimal software.
The other point was offloading work to the GPU, again modern GPU's are hugely powerful in relation to years past and software is starting to take advantage of that. Unfortunately Adobe (strangely as they do flash) has not grasped this for lightroom (they have to a point with PS)

LR4 is a bit sloppy in non processor intensive tasks. Obviously if you export 100 high res raw conversions a faster CPU will do it quicker (as expected) this is not the area of complaint by most. It's slow switching between modules (really slow I think) not that quick to start up..slow when zooming in on images, some settings being changed can also be an issue. If you check the resource monitor it's not taxing the processor during these times for the most part. Also some signs of memory leak inefficiency.

I'm not short on memory either (it's a complete non issue) CPU power is quite good too (not the best but good) this is not the issue, it's mostly Adobe needing to iron problems out.
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by agorabasta »

bfitzgerald wrote:LR4 is a bit sloppy in non processor intensive tasks.
No way, Barry! Just try it on some some 6Mp files and watch it fly.

Lr, just as any other serious graphics processing SW, is and will always be limited by processor power and memory throughput/speed.
The only way to make it significantly faster is to dumb it down. And no GPU-based accelerated co-processing is going to help with the local subpixel transforms (which is the most processor/mem intensive thing), that's simply because the GPU's are made for the global highly-parallelisable transforms.
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bfitzgerald
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by bfitzgerald »

Well it's slow even with 6mp raw files I know I've tried it. In contrast I'm running LR 3 on a laptop that isn't half as powerful as my desktop and it's notably faster than LR4
I know the processing has changed (yes it's better) in LR 4. Desktop is 64bit, laptop running 32bit
But exactly how much processing power do you have to lay down to get acceptable speed? I could wait for the next batch of FX processors and effectively more than double my CPU power, but I'm not convinced that this is the real issue. Ram def isn't..laptop is 3Gb, desktop is 16Gb..I mean do we need a super computer server processor multi threaded monster just to process some raw files?

Tried this:
http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/opt ... troom.html

And here we go folks with powerful hardware still having issues:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/4490291

We're talking about a high end workstation here..some serious power under the "hood" as they say in the USA.
If that's slow..it's not exactly a shock, normal but up to date desktop pc's are not running it that well.

Takes 10 seconds to switch from library to develop module. I'm not convinced this is a "weedy cpu" issue
It's a bit better than LR4.0...but unsatisfactory right now
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Dusty
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

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Coding in general has been getting sloppy for many years. There seems to never be a reason to go back and clean up old code, or restructure it. I know, we have feature bloat, software today does so much more than yesterday, but why do new programs that have no more features than old programs now have 6x the code?

Part of the problem is the new processors and more memory. After all, why worry? It will only get faster when they upgrade to the latest Corei15 processor with 64GB of RAM!

If the companies would go back on new versions and start with fresh re-writes, software would be faster and less bloated. But that takes $ no one wants to spend.

/rant

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bakubo
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by bakubo »

When I finally started using LR for real use and not just evaluation I had to make a decision about how to handle the fact that I had my photos in folders on both a USB 2.0 ehd and also a subset of them on my ihd. See earlier in this thread where I explained all of that. After posting on the Adobe LR forum asking for suggestions I finally decided to give up some performance in order to keep things simple. I only use the copies of the photos on my ehd and always import from there. It means that when I want to use LR I must have the ehd connected and it means that if I want to work on a photo LR must load it from the ehd. When I later upgrade my laptop it will have USB 3.0 ports and the ehd is a USB 3.0 ehd so when that happens I should get a pretty good speed upgrade when I load a photo. Another possibility is that the new laptop will have an ihd that is big enough to hold all my photos so that the catalog could point to them.
Mike-Photos
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by Mike-Photos »

bakubo wrote:When I finally started using LR for real use and not just evaluation I had to make a decision about how to handle the fact that I had my photos in folders on both a USB 2.0 ehd and also a subset of them on my ihd. See earlier in this thread where I explained all of that. After posting on the Adobe LR forum asking for suggestions I finally decided to give up some performance in order to keep things simple. I only use the copies of the photos on my ehd and always import from there. It means that when I want to use LR I must have the ehd connected and it means that if I want to work on a photo LR must load it from the ehd. When I later upgrade my laptop it will have USB 3.0 ports and the ehd is a USB 3.0 ehd so when that happens I should get a pretty good speed upgrade when I load a photo. Another possibility is that the new laptop will have an ihd that is big enough to hold all my photos so that the catalog could point to them.
I can't remember your views on the catalog, but another option is just not to use it, which is the way I work. I import photos, work on them, export them, and then remove them from the catalog. This keeps LR very lean and mean.

If you do this, you set LR to store the image adjustments in a sidecar file, which it stores in the same folder as the image. It's only a few k in size.

If you don't do this, and don't store sidecars, you have the additional obligation of backing up the catalog, because this is where your settings are stored.
Mike
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by agorabasta »

Henry,

As long as you have your catalog/cache/previews on internal drive, the slow external drive does not slow down Lr operation.

And storing adjustments in the .xmp sidecars is really much better, just as Mike advises. This way you can copy raw's together with xmp's onto another machine and have all adjustments recognised by Lr on that other machine.
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