Currently, the preview of the customise tab has to be moved and redrawn when a tool, that needs some extra tool space below the preview (white balance, crop, horizon, perspective etc.) is engaged.
This makes viewing the screen more tiresome than wanted and can cause unnecessary delays on less powerful machines.
I therefore propose that the PhotoLab GUI be enhanced for better user experience by eliminating said behaviour. Hence, the hight of the preview must be reduced - a bearable “cost” for better ergonomics.
One of my few significant gripes with PL is the fact that it constantly seems to need to redraw the screen, even when in theory nothing has changed. This would be fine if it regenerated the image in a timely manner, but to be completely honest, even on a powerful machine its painfully slow by modern standards.
As I see it this is actually PL’s biggest weakness. I have a relatively powerful machine, and its screen redraw speed is a major inconvenience for me.
Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that PL performs a lot of complex processing under the hood (which is fine, that’s why I use it), the problem is that nobody seems to have considered that once that processing has been done that the resulting processed image can be cached, and only fully regenerated if something has changed that requires the whole image to be regenerated. I get the distinct impression that PL performs very little caching as it seems like anything I do, however basic triggers a full on image regeneration. Yes this only takes a second or two (depending on the edits I have applied)… but those seconds quickly add up when you are processing hundreds of photos and each experimental tweak comes with a noticeable time penalty.
DxO really need to take a serious look at the interactive performance of PL vs their competitors, as the performance difference in some cases is so notable that they could well be losing potential customers as a result.