Why oh why do I keep using DPP...

[wq9nsc]

I have been using DPP since 2005 and at times I have found it to be at least mildly annoying with its issues but it is really time that Canon hired a professional developer to make it run like professional software should.

Fortunately I was just shooting photos of my family reunion today so not many photos and plenty of time which was good because I decided to try DPP on my new HP workstation build expecting to to be a little faster on the new system but I should have know being DPP that was hoping for too much. 

It is slow and sluggish and I will need to find the issues that is making it run slower.  I have been using a HP Z840 workstation running twin Intel 8 core Xeon processors with 128 GB of memory each with a pair of Nvidia workstation cards.  My new HP Z8 G5 is using a pair of Intel Xeon 28 core processors with 128 GB per CPU and a pair of Nvidia RTX 4000 ADA series cards with 20 GB of memory per card.  DPP is on one of four 2TB SS drives with two on each CPU bus and the photo files and output directory are on another.

So far I have gotten to watch several times with DPP go into a brief not responding coma, too slow to be practical auto gamma when you are working with a large number of files, and batch processing is slower than it was on the Win 10 system.  Watching the process monitor while this is going on, CPU utilization peaks at 5% staying at 1% most of the time with GPU utilization never exceeding 1% and the equally low stats for memory and disk utilization.  So DPP is incredibly poor at making use of available resources.

I am confident that I will find some issues that will hopefully get DPP back to what I saw on my Win 10 machine but I am running AutoCad, Matlab, and two heavy duty stats analysis packages and all of them fly on the new machine as expected and none required any tweaking, magic words, or voodoo spells which is how life should be.  

For the humorously bad parts, I am using the latest Windows version of DPP (4.20.11.0) yet with this latest version if you check for updates it asks if you want to upgrade to 4.20.11.0, the version it is already running, which is at least a new and amusing glitch for DPP.  In the stupid minor annoyance category, I didn't bother downloading all of the lens files when I first installed it on this machine and no matter where you first mouse within the image part of the screen to do something (like crop) it pops up a nag message at that point telling you it can't run digital lens optimizer because the data files have been downloaded yet.  This happens even though that tabbed section of the tool palette hasn't been selected and I had zero interest in running probably the slowest process DPP runs.  Not a huge deal but just another indicant of lack of care and quality testing.

Rant off but I am sure happy this isn't football season because I would be a most unhappy camper sufficiently motivated to jump ship.  At this point I am just slightly annoyed at the stupidity of it.

Rodger

[wq9nsc]

And on edit, I fixed the problem by installing DxO photolab. Lightning fast edits with no lagging or glitches and it exported 40 full resolution jpg files from the .CR3 files that my 1DX III bodies generate in just under 2 minutes.

CPU utilization using DxO peaked at 8 percent during RAW to JPG batch processing which is OK since it is a twin CPU workstation with a total of 56 cores but it also made use of the Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada cards with GPU utiliization peaking at 12% very briefly at times.  It is an entirely different experience and this software flies like it should on a fast workstation.

I will have to learn a bit with this different program but it is intuitive and easy to use, even if it wasn't so speedy, the sure and svelte behavior would still  cause me to adopt it.  It is nice that Canon includes DPP at no charge with their cameras and it is capable but free is very expensive if it wastes a lot of time.  Probably should be renamed DPC for consumer instead of professional since it would be fine if you are only editing a few images from time to time.

Rodger

[johnrmoyer]

I run DPP on a 2019 iMac with Intel i5-9600K. I did upgrade to 96 GB RAM because it was too slow with 40GB. Before I got the iMac, I ran DPP in a windows virtual machine using qemu on my Debian Linux desktop. 

On the iMac, sometimes DPP uses 300% to 400% CPU on a machine with 6 cores. The Linux HP Z240 desktop has Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 v5 @ 3.50GHz. DPP is a little faster on the iMac. Linux would cache in RAM the entire virtual disk used by the Windows virtual machine. I did exclude the DPP cache from time machine backups on the iMac because time machine would slow DPP. 

I also use Rawtherapee on the Debian machine and the Rawtherapee "capture sharpening" which does a Richardson/Lucy deconvolution takes about the same amount of time as "digital lens optimizer" in DPP. 

I no longer do Windows since I have retired and no longer am required to run Windows by my employer. But, I
 might guess that a virus scanner could make DPP extremely slow.

[wq9nsc]

John,
I figured a anti-virus/malware software might be the issue but I disabled both the HP "'Wolf" and Windows security to test and there was no noticeable difference.  I suspect there is some odd incompatibility between DPP and maybe just the Win 11 Workstation variant but I don't know.

This Z8 G5 came with Ubuntu 22.04 also installed but I haven't had a chance to try it yet between adopting an abandoned puppy, installing a pellet fireplace insert, and the usual summer yard work it has been busy. And the puppy is definitely the most important, most time consuming, and also most fun of the tasks!

Security software is definitely needed but I am not sure I am going to keep the HP Wolf stuff installed because it is incredibly invasive and interacts with BIOS in addition to the OS.  

Rodger

[Uneternal]

You could hook this software up to a whole server farm and it would run slow. Canon needs to buy a capable software team and develop a new version of this hot mess from scratch, for real. As much as I love the colors from DPP, I would never edit a whole batch of photos with it, cause it takes minutes to even export 10 pictures. Even freeware like RAWtherapee or Darktable does a better job. 

If anyone at Canon ever reads this: Fix your sluggish software by hiring a capable software team, improve speed using GPU and give it a modern interface that doesn't like it's been around since Windows 3.11.

[johnrmoyer]

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@Uneternal wrote:

You could hook this software up to a whole server farm and it would run slow. Canon needs to buy a capable software team and develop a new version of this hot mess from scratch, for real. As much as I love the colors from DPP, I would never edit a whole batch of photos with it, cause it takes minutes to even export 10 pictures. Even freeware like RAWtherapee or Darktable does a better job. 

If anyone at Canon ever reads this: Fix your sluggish software by hiring a capable software team, improve speed using GPU and give it a modern interface that doesn't like it's been around since Windows 3.11.

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How would you speed up a Richardson/Lucy deconvolution algorithm? Rawtherapee "capture sharpening" takes about the same time as Canon DPP "digital lens optimizer" with a similar radius and number of iterations.

I does not seem to me easy to run Richarson/Lucy in parallel on a GPU, but it is many years since I wrote such code.

It seems to me that DPP could improve disk access and management of the image cache.

[Uneternal]

I'm not a programmer but when software like Adobe, DxO and Capture One can do the same stuff 10x as fast even including several A.I. masks, it is certainly not the problem of 1 algorithm or the cache. 

[johnrmoyer]

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@Uneternal wrote:

I'm not a programmer but when software like Adobe, DxO and Capture One can do the same stuff 10x as fast even including several A.I. masks, it is certainly not the problem of 1 algorithm or the cache. 

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My guess would be that they are not doing the same stuff.

To speed up DPP and make it more like the others,

• go to settings https://cam.start.canon/en/S002/manual/html/UG-04_EditImage_0040.html#EditImage_0130_4 and enable prioritize speed instead of quality.
• in the camera, turn off peripheral illumination correction so it will not be done later automatically in DPP and do it later in DPP if needed and it is worth spending the time
• in the camera, turn off distortion correction, diffraction correction, auto illumination, highlight tone priority, and digital lens optimizer. These can be done later in DPP intentionally if it is worth your time.
• Have at least 48GB RAM to run DPP, or run it in a virtual machine with less RAM and the virtual disk cached in host RAM. Be certain that your computer is not using any swap.

Disclaimer: It has been decades since I used any Adobe software. I did a trial version of DxO and went back to DPP. I sometimes use rawtherapee. I think darktable is good, but it does not match my preferences. I sometimes use Gimp for things that I do not like to do  in DPP.

[Uneternal]

Even if you turn off all of that stuff it still doesn't export as fast. And you can't be seriously telling me I need 48 GB of RAM to edit a photo that has only 26 megabytes. Please. Each to their own, but could we stop defending a software that is build on sluggish code from the early 2000s with made-up arguments? Not everything is just based on hardware. 

[johnrmoyer]

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@Uneternal wrote:

Even if you turn off all of that stuff it still doesn't export as fast. And you can't be seriously telling me I need 48 GB of RAM to edit a photo that has only 26 megabytes. Please. Each to their own, but could we stop defending a software that is build on sluggish code from the early 2000s with made-up arguments? Not everything is just based on hardware. 

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I upgraded my 2019 iMac to 96GB RAM because it was too slow with 40GB.

My Debian Linux desktop where I run rawtherapee has 56GB RAM.

You seem to be claiming that you know more than I do about image processing algorithms and software development.