Digital Photo Pro really slow!

[J Peters]

More of a general Canon question but I own an M5 and used to have the original M.

I work in IT so I have access to old computers that are destined for the skip. I've had several iterations of home PC that started out as an ex-work computer. Took them home, maxed out the RAM, fitted a fast drive (solid state in the last one I did), and a nice clean install of Windows, and those machines flew. Boot times of 15-20 seconds were common. My last PC I could boot, look something up on Google, and shut down again in 1 minute.

However DPP ran like a dog. The old PC was Athlon based, if that makes a difference. So I eventually bit the bullet and for the first time actually bought a new PC like a normal person would. Again SSD, 16GB RAM, Intel i5, Windows 10 Pro.

Is DPP faster? Yes, about double the speed, but that's still pretty rubbish. Converting RAW to jpg takes about 30 secs per shot, however that doesn't bother me because it's a batch job I can leave running. What does bother me is moving from shot-to-shot in quick view I get a little 'timer' icon whilst each picture snaps into focus over about 8 seconds. 8 seconds isn't long but when you are flipping between shots to pick out the best, it ruins the whole point of 'quick' view.

Also moving the slider for noise reduction - That really does take forever. About 1 minute for each adjustment - making it impossible to do a before/after comparison. Contrast and levels are faster but still a bit laggy.

Why is no-one else complaining about this? Am I doing something wrong? Do I need a decent graphics card or something?

 

[StevenSHH]

https://support-hk.canon-asia.com/contents/HK/EN/0200579202.html

That's version 4.10.0, not sure what you have, it does says Nvidia driver helps, so check to see if you have latest driver and DPP software for M5.

Here is one with 4.8.x

https://community.usa.canon.com/t5/...-DPP-4-8-X-is-extremily-slow/m-p/254384#M6341

 

[Ed Wren]

What does bother me is moving from shot-to-shot in quick view I get a little 'timer' icon whilst each picture snaps into focus over about 8 seconds. 8 seconds isn't long but when you are flipping between shots to pick out the best, it ruins the whole point of 'quick' view.

Also moving the slider for noise reduction - That really does take forever. About 1 minute for each adjustment - making it impossible to do a before/after comparison. Contrast and levels are faster but still a bit laggy.

If you enable the modified quick view option (which admittedly sounds like something you would want), then DPP is processing each image, which as you noted is very slow. When you’re displaying the original, I think it’s just using the embedded JPEG in the RAW file and is much, much quicker. I’ve found that’s good enough to judge sharpness at 100%.

As for moving sliders around, with something like noise reduction you’re probably going to want to zoom in to 100% to notice the difference anyway, which should render much faster as DPP is only processing that section of the image. For contrast and levels, on my computer at least, DPP will refine the image to a usable state (good enough to A/B compare) within a few seconds. You don’t need to wait for it to fully process an image for most adjustments.

 

[timbazi]

CPU's integrated graphics struggle with graphical tasks, especially low end Intels.

Get a dedicated GPU, Nvidias GTX 1050ti 4gb would be enough, around 200 dollhairs probably way cheaper than that nowadays. (though i recommend a gpu with 6gb or more memory, because you'll be... damn i should've bought the other one)

I have a i5-4460, 16gb ddr3, gtx 1070 8gb, 2x SSD's and 1x 1TB HDD.

So far no problems, other than the CPU is starting to struggle with some of the heavier tasks, especially on video rendering and newer games. And moving from intel to better amd would mean buying new motherboard, cpu and ram, muy expensivo

TL;DR: Get a propper GPU

--
The exposure I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math.

 

[Anton Ev]

You can speed up the image preview with a good GPU (DPP supports HW acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs at least), but RAW-JPEG convertion would be still as slow as it was before.

Anyway, I advice you to use Lightroom instead. The performance is much better at every step, and final JPEG quality looks better in my opinion. That's why I use DPP for quick preview only.

 

[hBill]

Hmmm

Takes my Dell ( i 7 w/32 GB ram ) less than 60 seconds to convert 10 raw fotos from my m50 to jpeg .

Going from foto to foto just takes a moment + - . . .

I guess I 'm just lucky - or have a faster pc ? ? ?

ymmv

 

[R2D2]

Previews go a lot faster if you disable the various image processing options in-camera, such as DLO etc. Instead, apply them as needed during the Image Editing phase.

R2

 

[Anton Ev]

Which version of i7 are you on? Do you have an SSD or HDD?

 

[Anthony Milton]

I am a little puzzled by some of the answers (I don’t know what a Nvidia driver is, or CPU Integrated Graphics or GPU).I am a simple person, I download all my images directly from the SDXC card to an external hard drive (with a back-up external hard drive which for security is kept in one of my out buildings)

The images are stored in numbered folders, each folder containing 200 images (100 Raw plus the corresponding 100 JPEG images). Each folder is approximately 4.5 GB in size.

DPP (4.10.0.0) takes approximately 10 seconds to display the 200 images in each folder. Each RAW image takes less than 2 seconds to open, to work on. When I have worked on an image it is saved in a separate folder as both a 16 BIT TIFF image and Exif-JPEG image. This takes about fifteen seconds (remember each TIFF file is about 150 MB)

I can also play around with images using DxO Photolab 2, and Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019.

 

[OzarkAggie]

More of a general Canon question but I own an M5 and used to have the original M.

I work in IT so I have access to old computers that are destined for the skip. I've had several iterations of home PC that started out as an ex-work computer. Took them home, maxed out the RAM, fitted a fast drive (solid state in the last one I did), and a nice clean install of Windows, and those machines flew. Boot times of 15-20 seconds were common. My last PC I could boot, look something up on Google, and shut down again in 1 minute.

However DPP ran like a dog. The old PC was Athlon based, if that makes a difference. So I eventually bit the bullet and for the first time actually bought a new PC like a normal person would. Again SSD, 16GB RAM, Intel i5, Windows 10 Pro.

Is DPP faster? Yes, about double the speed, but that's still pretty rubbish. Converting RAW to jpg takes about 30 secs per shot, however that doesn't bother me because it's a batch job I can leave running. What does bother me is moving from shot-to-shot in quick view I get a little 'timer' icon whilst each picture snaps into focus over about 8 seconds. 8 seconds isn't long but when you are flipping between shots to pick out the best, it ruins the whole point of 'quick' view.

Also moving the slider for noise reduction - That really does take forever. About 1 minute for each adjustment - making it impossible to do a before/after comparison. Contrast and levels are faster but still a bit laggy.

Why is no-one else complaining about this? Am I doing something wrong? Do I need a decent graphics card or something?

I have a similar background and a similar experience with DPP. My thought is that it is not optimized for multiple cores, various instructions sets, but there's no way to really know unless you have an uncommon level of sophistication.

It's too bad because as I've dug into the features there's some aspects that are really nice to have. You can save a file in RAW format, I've been cropping for a window 11x14 inches and DPP makes this easy. It's just too bad it is frustratingly slow.

Maybe we should develop a survey of workstations and their response, or lack thereof. Not sure what it would take for Canon to address this issue.

 

[hBill]

Followup is :

Dell tower running msw 10 pro

intel i7 8700 3.2ghz

32gb ram

internal hdd 1tb around 5k

external hdd - the workhorse - 1 tb either 7k or 10k drive - I forget but it holds all my data files for processing with other ext drvs for backup

there's a nividia graphics card but I let MSW 10 Pro handle it

and fwiw - I don't process in camera --- I let the computer do the computing ( read that as pp'ing )

bottm line - computers are never fast enough but mine converts files or runs DLO on a foto within seconds rather than minutes so I can't complain .

Having a fast computer is mostly a matter of money

( though for those that remember running Word Star did go faster if you set up the overlays on a 128K " ram disk " )

Definitely - YMMV

 

[Advi]

There are rumors Canon is developing a sucessor for the 1Dx II. It'll be an R with a 100 Mp sensor.

Well, if DPP is already slow with EOS M 24 Mp sensor, it'll be unberable for those using the new big sensor.

It doesn't make sense you need a computer that is able to do the calculations to launch a rocket in order to use DPP.

 

[OzarkAggie]

It doesn't make sense you need a computer that is able to do the calculations to launch a rocket in order to use DPP.

Actually a 386 DX would do that handily.

 

[Advi]

It doesn't make sense you need a computer that is able to do the calculations to launch a rocket in order to use DPP.

Actually a 386 DX would do that handily.

Of course. It would take just 1 hour to open one photo for quick check.

Assuming DPP is able to run with only 4Gb of RAM. (DPP doens't run on Dan's computer because it doesn't have enough RAM.)

And later, you can edit a 4K video on the same 386 DX.

 

[OzarkAggie]

It doesn't make sense you need a computer that is able to do the calculations to launch a rocket in order to use DPP.

Actually a 386 DX would do that handily.

Of course. It would take just 1 hour to open one photo for quick check.

Assuming DPP is able to run with only 4Gb of RAM. (DPP doens't run on Dan's computer because it doesn't have enough RAM.)

And later, you can edit a 4K video on the same 386 DX.

I was referring to a probe launched by NASA around 10 years ago that used a 386 chip. It was using the onboard computer to calculate trajectory which is mathematically similar to launching a rocket. IOW launching a rocket is relatively simple by comparison to the software used for DPP.

Dan has a computer that would best be used for word processing and calendar events.

 

[mouzhik]

It doesn't make sense you need a computer that is able to do the calculations to launch a rocket in order to use DPP.

Actually a 386 DX would do that handily.

Of course. It would take just 1 hour to open one photo for quick check.

Assuming DPP is able to run with only 4Gb of RAM. (DPP doens't run on Dan's computer because it doesn't have enough RAM.)

And later, you can edit a 4K video on the same 386 DX.

I was referring to a probe launched by NASA around 10 years ago that used a 386 chip. It was using the onboard computer to calculate trajectory which is mathematically similar to launching a rocket. IOW launching a rocket is relatively simple by comparison to the software used for DPP.

Dan has a computer that would best be used for word processing and calendar events.

+1

Image processing requires a lot of calculating power, especially for modern RAW files: you can literally "see" it while doing local adjustments, for instance, in LightRoom or Photoshop... so DPP is no exception here.

A computer with a dedicated graphics card and more RAM would certainly be more suitable for running DPP.

--
https://www.flickr.com/photos/zemzem/

 

[peter wingfield]

Had old version of DPP just got a 90d and firstly DPP wouldn`t recognise 90d then could not open RAW ??

Updated to latest DPP now recognises camera and opens Raw files ok but unbeleiveably slow i`m using a quad core intel i5 16 gig of ram using up to date windows 10 and every other program is very fast so for me DPP is now unusable,

Now i batch convert to 16bit TIFF then use GIMP to edit ( lots of clicks etc but very very fast)

 

[R2D2]

Had old version of DPP just got a 90d and firstly DPP wouldn`t recognise 90d then could not open RAW ??

Updated to latest DPP now recognises camera and opens Raw files ok but unbeleiveably slow i`m using a quad core intel i5 16 gig of ram using up to date windows 10 and every other program is very fast so for me DPP is now unusable,

Now i batch convert to 16bit TIFF then use GIMP to edit ( lots of clicks etc but very very fast)

HeHe, try editing those on a Pentium! You'll know the true meaning of slooow. :-(

With these higher MP sensors, Canon really needs to update their engine if they want to keep DPP users around (like me).

I'm getting a new PC next week (Ryzen 4.4 GHz), so that should help quite a bit.

In the meantime, you can go into Tools>Preferences>Image Processing 2 and under "Quick Check Windows Settings" checkmark the "Show Original Image" button. This will at least speed up the Quickview function as you check for critical focus.

R2