Digital Photo Professional - New release 4.21.30

[March411]

For those that use it it's available here: Digital Photo Professional 

When you use the link it should recognize your OS and supply the correct download. There isn't much in the way of release notes but they can be found here: Digital Photo Professional 4.21.30 for Windows 

I have loaded it and taken it for a spin. Noting much to note although it does appear to load images faster. I always had an issue where the photo would load and then a delay to focus, that time has been reduced.. 

[JamesHarvey]

I find DPP4 is especially valuable with new cameras, before Adobe have refined their matching algorithms, and for onward processing of some raws that I have pre-processed in Canon NN where I only need basic corrections and/or need to see the details of the gamma curve applied to the raw, which LR/PS hides.  Otherwise yes, LR/PS does just about everything else you need and more! 

[ebiggs1]

'...where I only need basic corrections..."

That defines DPP4 perfectly.

[wq9nsc]

After a couple of hours of editing this morning, I am getting the typical sluggish DPP behavior.  I shot 2,400 images at a soccer match yesterday using a pair of 1DX III bodies and after spending some editing time, DPP is doing the same "memory leak" behavior it has shown since I first started using it in 2005. 

The DPP memory usage had grown to just over 5 GB which is less than 1% of available RAM (dual CPU workstation with 256 GB per CPU) but once the DPP process gets fat, it also gets slow regardless of available RAM resources.  Relaunching it results in 2.7 GB of RAM usage and fast performance.  As usual, CPU utilization is very low and GPU usage by DPP is near nil while my video editing software takes good advantage of the dual Nvidia Ada series workstation cards 😞

DPP does a lot of things very well but it so desperately needs a clean rewrite.  For those of you who had children growing up in the Harry Potter book series era, DPP is the software version of the Weasley home 😂

Rodger

[March411]

Great post Rodger, DPP can/does flatten your resources if you spend a good amount of time in the application. I use McAfee PC Optimizer and it allows you to defragment and recover memory on the fly. I leave it running when I am working in DPP for extended periods and recover memory a couple times during my processing.

It's a decent program for keep the PC running clean. 

[ebiggs1]

" DPP can/does flatten your resources if you spend a good amount of time ..."

DPP4's best attribute is, it is free.

[wq9nsc]

Thanks Marc!

I will give it a try.  Hopefully it works with the pro workstation edition of Win 11 because some utilities don't play well with dual processors and/or the pro workstation version of Windows.  The McAfee name is definitely a blast from the past for me 🙂

Rodger

[FloridaDrafter]

@wq9nsc : Rodger, do you think RAMMAP by Sysinternals would help you? I think it frees up RAM on the fly. I used it years ago, or something similar in their suite.

Newton

[wq9nsc]

Thanks Newton!

I am going to look into some memory utilities later this week.  I will be shooting a lot of photos next weekend so it will be a good chance to test.  I run a lot of different software on the workstation including video editing along with data analysis and mathematical modeling programs and DPP is the only bad actor so I have never done a deep dive into external solutions to DPP shortcomings.  True happiness would be a memory behaved version of DPP that runs natively in Linux and major bonus points if a cropping tool was available in the primary exposure/style/sharpening tab 🙂

I was hoping to have more time to do some software changes early this week but I am helping interview several visiting candidates most of the week; something I try to avoid since I am mostly retired and on prof emeritus status but because we are a bit short of terminally degreed faculty I am doing my part.  Sometimes there isn't much difference between being mostly and fully retired 😂
Rodger

[ebiggs1]

"Sometimes there isn't much difference between being mostly and fully retired"

Amen!

[JamesHarvey]

NN runs largely on the GPU.  I'm running a 20 core i7 + 96GB DDR5 + RTX4070ti super + 2x2TB nvme2 ssds (for OS, apps and active files) + 34TB spinning.  I see similar CPU usage by DPP (by cores) as Roger does on his server, so it's quite practical to put a batch into NN and let that run while editing in DPP as they are not using the same resources.  I wish Canon would optimize their resource use as Blackmagic does with DaVinci, and Adobe do to some extent, where they move processes between the various processing resources as best suits each process in question, and make full use of those resources: I regularly see 70% CPU and 90% CPU usage when rendering a video file.  

NN provides more than just NR, simultaneously it also performs lens correction and sharpening.  With Canon lenses the results are IMO far superior to what can be achieved with the equivalents in Lightroom, but you can also output from NN as a CR3 file for processing by non-Canon apps.