System: I have a Mac Pro, 3.5GHz 6-Core, Intel Xeon E5 with 12MB L3 cache and Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz and a Dual AMD FirePro D500 graphics processors with 3GB of GDDR5 VRAM each. I have 16 GB of RAM. I have a 256 SSD that is roughly half full. I’m using Mojave. My files are stored on an external LaCie hard drive.
Issue: Exporting a file to Luminar 3 seems slow.
Test: I opened a 36 mb dng file in PL2. 1) I adjusted the image, applied Quick noise reduction, and exported it as a dng file to Luminar 3. It took 23 seconds to export the file to Luminar 3. 2) I opened a second copy of the same file, applied the same adjustments but used Prime noise reduction. It took 1 minute, 2 seconds to export the dng file to Luminar 3. (In both cases, Luminar took roughly 14 seconds to fully open the file.) 3) By comparison, I adjusted the same file in ACR, added a significant amount of noise reduction, and exported it to PS–it took 19 seconds to export.
Question: Since I am new to PL2, is the performance from PL2 to Luminar 3 (given my system) what I should expect? Any thoughts?
Prime Noise Reduction is very processor intensive. My images often export in under 10 seconds each without Prime Noise and in about two minutes each when enabled.
I only enabled Prime Noise Reduction as a final step when adjusting images (I avoid even Fast Noise Reduction while I work as it makes sliders slower all by itself). The way to do it is select all the images out of the set to which you wish to apply PNR and then apply it to one of them. All of them will get exactly that dose of PNR. Normally I turn PNR way down. 12 (instead of 40) is my default and I find it clears up noise from ISO 6400 Canon 5DS R files flawlessly. Anything more and the final image starts to look processed and less natural.
PhotoLab is definitely worth the wait on export and is in another category than any other software I’ve seen in terms of reducing noise without compromising an image’s integrity (via smearing, blurring, muddying, pointillism or some combination of the above).
Thanks for your experiments and advice! I appreciate the time you put into responding to my post. Your results pretty much parallel mine–assuming similar systems, etc. I have some infrared photos with unusual grain that should be a good test of the NR capabilities–especially PNR. And I have some color ISO 3200 and 6400 ballet photos and I look forward to running PL2 on them.
To add to Alec’s comments, on my Windows 10 machine, with 24 GB of ram and an I7 processor, but only an older midrange video card, My 30mb raw images take less then 30 seconds to export with PRIME NR , less than 12 second with HQ (Fast) NR, and around 5 to 6 seconds with no NR. With regard to PRIME, the timing for an export of the same image from Lightroom is not a good comparison since the extremely intensive algorithm used for PRIME results in far superior results over anything LR’s noise reduction is capable of producing. The penalty for those superior results is additional processing time.
I’d love to see your ballet photos. PhotoLab and Prime Noise Reduction are perfect for reducing the noise from low light theatre pictures but retaining a natural quality to the photos.
Mark, thanks for your comments, too. I’m glad you are having success in more quickly exporting files than I am. I’m going to reassess my system and since various parts can be upgraded, I’ll consider if an upgrade is possible and if so, cost-effective.
Please keep in mind I’m on Windows 10. There seems to be many more Mac performance issues reported here then Windows issues. As a result I wouldn’t assume that upgrading any of your hardware will be a magic bullet. There may be operating system issues that DXO has yet to identify.
Alec, I have some ballet photos I processed with ACR/Photoshop and Neat Image noise reduction. I’m going to process the same images with PL2 and compare the differences between the two files. I fooled around with an ISO 3200 file this afternoon and found that PL2 appeared to more effectively reduce the noise–in part shrinking the size of residual noise too.