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

[raviballa]

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?

[Waddizzle]

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@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?

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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.

[RobertTheFat]

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@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?

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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.

[Waddizzle]

"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.

[raviballa]

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) 😞

[Waddizzle]

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@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) 😞

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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.

[raviballa]

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...

[Waddizzle]

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@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...

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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.

[willowdkQk]

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

[Richard]

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.