topic Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance) in Camera Software

Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

raviballa — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 19:31:48 GMT

I would love to continue to use DPP for its color output. But, where I am struggling with is its slowness to process RAW files. Loading of the RAW files is slow and I cannot tell when my minor corrections are applied to the image (there is no indication of DPP processing my adjustments). The 'Quick Check' of images is good though, without any lag.

Any suggestions?

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

Waddizzle — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 21:11:07 GMT

@raviballa wrote:
I would love to continue to use DPP for its color output. But, where I am struggling with is its slowness to process RAW files. Loading of the RAW files is slow and I cannot tell when my minor corrections are applied to the image (there is no indication of DPP processing my adjustments). The 'Quick Check' of images is good though, without any lag.

Any suggestions?

What OS are you running? DPP4 needs lots of memory under Windows, at least 8GB, if not more. I'm not saying more RAM will eliminate all issues, but it does speed it up.

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

RobertTheFat — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 21:24:43 GMT

@raviballa wrote:
I would love to continue to use DPP for its color output. But, where I am struggling with is its slowness to process RAW files. Loading of the RAW files is slow and I cannot tell when my minor corrections are applied to the image (there is no indication of DPP processing my adjustments). The 'Quick Check' of images is good though, without any lag.

Any suggestions?

Yes. Join the chorus. Performance has been a major issue with DPP 4 since the beginning (along with general buginess and the unintuitive behavior of various components of the user interface). I've complained about this from time to time, as have others, but Canon has largely turned a deaf ear to all complaints. In fact, while a few bugs do appear to have been fixed, my impression is that the performance problem has gotten worse, not better. It may just be a matter of perception: the latest version seems to be the slowest yet, but that may be just because it doesn't crash as often. Or to put it another way, what seemed in the past to be permanent loops may in fact be mere slowness. It's a shame, because featurewise, DPP 4 is actually pretty good - a major improvement over DPP 3. But the bottom line is that if the program is unusably slow, the feature set doesn't matter much.

Canon's seeming indifference to DPP 4's problems leads me to conclude that they may actually be powerless to do much about them. I strongly suspect that they contracted out the development effort and that the contractor simply did a lousy job. Canon may not even have the source code; and even if they do, they may not have anyone who really understands it. If their only options are to sue the contractor and/or have someone else do it over, it figures to be a long time, if ever, before we see a significant improvement. Meanwhile, all we can do is keep complaining and hope for the best.

The big beneficiary, I suppose, is Adobe. They must be having a good laugh at the current situation.

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

Waddizzle — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 23:42:46 GMT

"In fact, while a few bugs do appear to have been fixed, my impression is that the performance problem has gotten worse, not better. It may just be a matter of perception: the latest version seems to be the slowest yet, but that may be just because it doesn't crash as often.."

I used DPP3 for well over a year, and DPP4 for a 3 months, or so. I still us it when I don't want to import stuff into Lightroom 6. I have never had DPP4 crash on me. And, I am not aware of any specific bugs. I guess I don't use it enough. I always wait for that little spinning icon to finish spinning and go away, though. I running it on a laptop with 64bit Windows 10, w/8GB RAM

But, adding more memory did help speed it up. The software seems to have issues with what a software designer would refer to as garbage collection, and memory management as a whole. I can only speculate on what the exact issues could be. I do know that a 64-bit CPU is not very efficient working with 8-bit and 16-bit data, because it has to convert it to/from 64 bits.

In other words, your photos will consume twice as much RAM because of the 64-bit CPU compared to a 32 bit CPU, becaause data is stored as 64 bit words, instead of 32 bit words. Ditto for any scratchpad RAM that it uses and disposes on the fly.

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

raviballa — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 19:00:59 GMT

I have a pretty good system. 64-bit Windows 10 with 12GB RAM. I monitor the resource usage when the app is in use. Neither CPU nor Memory peak. It is just the app is slow.

It takes 10secs to load a RAW image. The biggest setback is not knowing when your adjustments are actually applied. There is no visual indication of it working to apply your adjustments (unless it is drastic and you notice it after about 4/5secs) 😞

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

Waddizzle — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 19:14:27 GMT

@raviballa wrote:
I have a pretty good system. 64-bit Windows 10 with 12GB RAM. I monitor the resource usage when the app is in use. Neither CPU nor Memory peak. It is just the app is slow.

It takes 10secs to load a RAW image. The biggest setback is not knowing when your adjustments are actually applied. There is no visual indication of it working to apply your adjustments (unless it is drastic and you notice it after about 4/5secs) 😞

There is a visual cue as to when the adjustments are being made, and when they are completed. Look for a little icon that looks like a spining wheel in the lower right corner of the preview window when your are in "Edit Image" mode. It starts off "full-size", and then reduces to half the initial size after a few seconds.

The application seems to run its' most time consuming processes in the background, as opposed to the foreground. I think part of the problem is related to animating the spinning wheel icon display. A simple bar graph would have been far more efficient.

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

raviballa — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 19:55:00 GMT

I know what spinning wheel you are referring to. But, it does not show up when you are making adjustments like Brightness, Sharpness, Color tone etc...

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

Waddizzle — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 10:25:58 GMT

@raviballa wrote:
I know what spinning wheel you are referring to. But, it does not show up when you are making adjustments like Brightness, Sharpness, Color tone etc...

It does for me. I see it all of the time, and have to wait on it. I always use "Edit Image" mode. I'm running Windows 10, 64-bits, 16 GB. I've discovered that memory chips are pretty cheap when you install them yourself.

[EDIT] Just played around with it for the first time in a while. I always wait for the icon to go away before making any edits. Sometimes the spinning icon may re-appear if you make a lot of fast changes, but generally the edits are near instantaneous. The preview box image changes just as quickly as the image in the Editing Window once an image has completely loaded.

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

willowdkQk — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 10:42:31 GMT

Hi,

As a photographic learner, I really appreciate the free software, and generally think it an effective tool.

I just have one problem. I often see on forums people list their system specs, and most commonly these days a minimum of 8GB of RAM is quoted, often higher.

I have 16GB, but on checking the usage, it never rises above 5.4, during a batch conversion.

Is that the limit of canon DPP? Or can I configure something to make it use more available RAM.

um... I have a, intel 4710 (max 3.28GHz), win10.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Peter

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

vincentau — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 09:42:51 GMT

That's true we are facing the performance issue when process huge amount of RAW files via DPP.

I always get slow to preview and edit photos, quite time consuming process if you have ten thousands of photos need to work on it. How’s painful that I think as a nature photographer would know what I’m say.

Also, I have a comment on NR processing performance, more or less as a Canon user will be interested to know how well DPP did it. I would say that after I read through on some paper comparison, I’m not surprising another one did well than DPP but not a huge different that I don’t expecting result. So nosily pixels spots within the photo but brand (A, LR) did very well even though ISO 12800 captured from 7D Mark II, I know DPP is free but everyone knew that just a marketing game (Wool from the sheep) you and me had paid already.

Hope Canon’s software development team really spends more effort to enhance this two issues (high ISO NR control and the processing RAW file performance), we appreciated that if Canon user’s like me to get a good one finally.

Thank you.

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

Richard — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 21:42:37 GMT

Hi Peter,

Thank you for posting.

For the installation of Digital Photo Professional (DPP), we require a minimum of 2 GB and recommend 4 GB, or more. Since your computer indicates that 5.4 GB is being used, DPP is using all it can.

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

vincentau — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 04:09:27 GMT

Does anyone know that below meaning just released from Canon's of Hong Kong for DPP 4.5.20 :-

Caution

- The recipes in Digital Photo Professional 4-series cannot be used interchangeably with the recipes in Digital Photo Professional 1 through Digital Photo Professional 3.
- Digital Photo Professional 4-series and Digital Photo Professional 3.15 can be simultaneously installed to one computer.
- Improved the display speed by using a graphics processor (GPU) to process images for preview. For converting and saving, and printing, the conventional CPU processing is used.
To use this function, a GPU that has 1.0GB or more of built-in video memory and that supports CUDA (Compute Capability 2.0 or later) made by NVIDIA is required.
In addition, the latest driver made by NVIDIA must be installed.

As result, means that if user have Mac machine with ATI chips set will not support GPU processing to speed up image preview performance?!

Thank you.

Vincent

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

lankforddl — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 03:52:33 GMT

I've been using DPP3.x for a long time now and everything was working great. I upgraded to DPP4 and it eats memory like crazy. I have a Ryzen7 8 Core CPU with 32GB of RAM. Windows 10 64bit. SSD drive. The works.

Any advice on how to rectify this? Seems like a memory leak.

The memory consumption seems directly related to the number of photos in the active working folder. For example this folder has 80 images in it and consumes 99% of the RAM. I can opn a folder with 5 images and it consumes 7% or so.

Current version of DPP4 is 4.6.10.0

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

Waddizzle — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 09:00:58 GMT

Using a separate graphics card with its' own video memory makes all the difference in the world.

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

BurnUnit — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 14:58:19 GMT

@lankforddl wrote:
Seems like a memory leak.

The memory consumption seems directly related to the number of photos in the active working folder. For example this folder has 80 images in it and consumes 99% of the RAM.

Current version of DPP4 is 4.6.10.0

Nice piece of detective work! Thanks for posting this. I hadn't picked up on the relationship between the sluggishness and the large number of files in the active folder. What can make working with DPP4 so frustrating is that occasionally it runs up to speed but then the next time it will be bog slow. And it's not unusual for me to be working out of a folder with 50 or 100 files. Maybe rearranging things into some smaller subfolders would be a good workaround for the time being.

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

BurnUnit — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 14:57:27 GMT

@Waddizzle wrote:
Using a separate graphics card with its' own video memory makes all the difference in the world.

I'm working strictly with the on board video on my Win7 Ultimate machine, so I think i'll be looking into adding a seperate graphics card of some sort. I'm assuming that it won't need to be any kind of an upscale gaming video card, maybe with 1 or 2 GB of its own RAM? Wonder if there's any other reconfiguring required...

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

Waddizzle — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 15:39:44 GMT

@BurnUnit wrote:
@Waddizzle wrote:
Using a separate graphics card with its' own video memory makes all the difference in the world.
I'm working strictly with the on board video on my Win7 Ultimate machine, so I think i'll be looking into adding a seperate graphics card of some sort. I'm assuming that it won't need to be any kind of an upscale gaming video card, maybe with 1 or 2 GB of its own RAM? Wonder if there's any other reconfiguring required...

I recently bought a gaming laptop because it was cheaper than a workstation laptop. It has an i7 w/8 CPUs, 16 GB of system RAM and 4 GB on an NVIDIA graphics card. When I run DPP4, it runs as fast as DPP3 did on my old Windows 7 machine, if not faster when it comes to batch processing.

I can start editing a photo after 2-3 seconds, instead of 20-30 seconds of watching the little spinning icon as the image is loaded. My old DPP3 machine could batch process 20-30MB RAW files at about one per minute. The gaming laptop can do about six per minute.

I've run DPP4 on another laptop with an i3 and 8GB of RAM, and it crawls. You can configure which applications use the graphics card. Enabling DPP4 to use the graphics card seems to make it lightning fast. Apparently, you cannot use a budget priced laptop, or even a low to medium performance laptop, with DPP4. But, you don't need to buy the most expensive machine, either. I bought a Dell on sale for roughly $1000.

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

KBeat — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 16:00:28 GMT

Yes, I have the same problem. DPP (4.6.10) is virtually unusable with its current performance. I've been going back and forth with the Canon devs, and as of now they have no fix or explanation other than to admit "there is definitely something going on".

I just did a commercial shoot where the workers were wearing very bright safety orange shirts. The color renders terribly in Lightroom, surprisingly well in macOS Photos, okay in DxO, but nearly perfect in DPP. Naturally, I wanted to handle production of this project in DPP, but I just can't do it.

It takes, on average, 20 seconds for a 5D Mark IV RAW file to load once I press "Edit Image." Once there, most of the editing is okay if not great, but selecting the dust/stamp tab takes another 25 seconds to load. Oh, and forget about trying to manually adjust image rotation/angle. It's so jerky it's unusable. I have to randomly enter numbers until I hit on just the right angle adjustment. Oh, and if you spend too much time editing the image, it will stop updating the preview with your adjustments, like it's run out of cache or memory. At that point, I can't even load a before and after preview.

I'm running on pretty high end machine. A MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) with 2.5 GHz quad-core i7, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB SSD along with the discrete NVIDIA GeForce GT750M with 2 GB of VRAM. I've tried DPP with "use graphics processor for image processing" enabled and disabled and, it if helps, it's so minimal I don't notice much of a difference.

Processor intensive applications like FinalCut Pro X, Photoshop, Lightroom, DxO and Photos run flawlessly on my MBP. DPP is the first application I've had serious performance issues with in years.

I put together a screen video for Canon showing the performance, so there is no question about my interpretation of the issue. Performance is abysmal. Restarts, reinstalls, and even trying an earlier version (they wanted me to try 4.5.20) have made no difference in terms of performance. DPP simply can't handle the 30 megapixel RAW images out of the 5D Mark IV. It's a shame, because in certain instances, nothing can touch DPP for color.

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

kvbarkley — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 16:08:54 GMT

Point the developers to this thread so that they know it is a more general problem and not specific to Macs.

Re: Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

raviballa — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 16:12:57 GMT

@KBeat, you nailed it on the head. Thanks for the detailed description. I have tried everything you did as well. As you said, DPP has the best colors in RAW image processing. If only they could improve the performance, this woud be a great product.