Still has lagging with masks. However, the images are on an external SSD and when i moved some of them to the internal SSD, the lagging is less noticeable.
has anyone else experienced this issue and have found a way around it?
TIA Glyn
Best bet for optimal performance is to keep images locally and to verify that and what kind of co-processing is used.
PL is slowish with masking and AI compared to other apps that run nicely on my old computers. DxO might eventually get performance up to par. We’ll see.
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Thanks for the reply. I am waiting for a faster external SSD and see what affect it has
I agree with @platypus - keeping the images you’re editing on your local driver (ideally that’s also your fastest drive) does make a noticeable difference to performance.
I’d also recommend not running anything else alongside PhotoLab, and occasionally restarting the software or even your whole system if you find it’s getting sluggish.
Again agreeing with the above; PhotoLab is not very well optimised currently and easily gets sluggish, especially when it comes to masking. I even sometimes turn my masks off to make other global edits to the image, simply because it speeds up the process, then turn them back on before export. It’s all irritatingly fiddly, though.
Have to say I work off a fast external Thunderbolt SSD and find it very close in practice to the internal drive. You do need to ensure that all elements of the chain are fully up to spec, however. The NVMe drive itself, the housing-interface and the cable. Something as simple as using a below-spec cable can have a massive negative impact.
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Ditto checking other processes running. macOS does great managing resources, and I usually quit nothing on my M4 mini/32gb.
But the other day PL started lagging, so I checked Activity Monitor and was horrified to discover Facebook in a single background browser tab gobbling up 25% CPU usage!
Shame on Meta that’s insane IMHO.
Thank you all for the input. One thought; if you have sufficient RAM, would PL use it rather using the drive. I see there is a cache setting and I will try bumping it up and see if that helps.
I have an easy solution for that. I’ve been using it for over 10 years now. 
Regarding masking performance, yeah, I think you could get a maxed out Mac Studio with M? Ultra and the masks would cause lag.
Thunderbolt is very very fast for external storage, but internal storage on Macs these days is insanely fast.
Could I ask what kind of images it is people are working with that cause these pretty high spec Macs to apparently perform so sluggishly? The reason I ask is that I have not myself experienced anything like that. Most of the images are 24, 26 or 61 megapixel RAW files from a Sony A6400, A6700 (APS-C) and A7IVr (full frame). The edits are usually on a 4TB 40gbs Thunderbolt drive. I do use some of the new AI masks, combined with control points, grads, etc… it is all very quick and smooth on my M4 Mac mini with 24GB Ram, and even works well enough to my satisfaction if I am travelling and using my older M2 MacBook Air with only 8GB of RAM! I tend to only edit one or two images at a time. I do not have dozens of windows open. So I am genuinely curious as to what kind of images are taking up all these resources.
For reference I upped the cache in PL and it made no difference. I monitored the memory and it varied between 8 and 11 Gb when editing with lots of AI masks on images located on the external SSD. I found no lagging at all now even when I reset the cache to default 1000mb.
Before my initial post, I saw a lot of lagging, but now very little. AFAIK, nothing has been changed. I think that memery usage is managed by the OS and not PL. It seems to me that the SSD does not get involved if there are sufficient memory.
Am I right in my thinking?
I would not expect to see swapping memory to an external drive even when editing 61 megapixel RAW files, or 200mb+ bitmaps. I do not even see that on an M2 MacBook Air with only 8GB of Ram.
Interesting. I feel like I’ve encountered the same on PC.
There are times where I’ve been using my system all day and then booted up PhotoLab and it’s worked smoothly. There are times when PhotoLab is the first thing I’ve loaded after a fresh restart and it’s run sluggishly… and all on the same files, settings etc. etc.
It’s quite baffling and I don’t know what causes it.
Computers with SSDs take time off to reorganise the SSD for wear levelling. Depending on when this is done, I get some impact on performance by zillions of helper tasks (on Mac) and often enough, Adobe products use loads of processing power for a few minutes.
If I had to get a new Mac, I’d pump money into RAM and drive space rather than into processing power. But for now, the 2019 iMac and 2020 M1 MacBook Air still work as expected.
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It seems like performance issues can be relative to expectations. How fast are AI masks and denoising supposed to take on files from a 45mp camera?
Years ago when I was using Capture One Pro on a well spec’d iMac it seemed to me that it should be snappier. Now, I’m running PhotoLab 9 on a 2021 16’ MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro chip and 32GB of RAM. AI masks and denoising are not snappy and sometimes as long as 10 seconds or so. It varies widely depending on the image. I wish it were faster but not enough to buy new hardware. Sometimes exports or opening an image in Nik from PL takes even longer but again, not a deal breaker and not sure if LR or CO would be any faster.
It would be nice to see how fast these memory/processor intensive edits are on various level machines just to have a baseline expectation. This would help to know if upgrading hardware would be worth it. It would also be interesting to see how fast LR and CO are in comparison on the same hardware.
I think all this is also relative to what you do. Time is money when you’re a high volume pro. For low volume amateurs like me a little sluggishness is only a minor aggravation.
Let me put it this way: Editing the same 20mp files from my Canon R6 is a much slicker experience in Capture One than it is in PhotoLab.
That’s a same-day comparison with no changes to settings, software, or files. C1 is simply faster.
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I haven’t used Capture One since version 9. Does the current version of Capture One have AI masking and denoising? Those are the only things that slow down my MacBook in PhotoLab. For a fair comparison the hardware, the file and the process would have to be the same. And for a fair comparison the results and the time required to achieve them would have to be the same too.
I can’t be too scientific as I’m not nearly as familiar with Capture One as with PhotoLab but it does have AI masking, it does have de-noising, and both seem to work well.
Per the above, I’m not familiar with trying to squeeze the best optical quality out of Capture One so I can’t remark on the quality of the image vs. the same efforts in PhotoLab. I imagine PhotoLab could produce a sharper image and with better de-noising - I’ve found it superior in those areas.
But…
What I can - and just did - do in Capture One is edit an entire image with virtually no performance drop during my editing process (a small pause took place while detecting my subject in AI masking, but that’s it, and it was shorter than PhotoLab takes doing the same thing). Besides that? No lengthy stutters and pauses, no disabling masks so that I could make global edits to an image at speed.
Meanwhile in PhotoLab I quickly find performance to be jerky in general editing and sometimes slow to a crawl where AI masking is introduced.
On ocasion I’ve guessed edits to an image and exported them because it was quicker than waiting for an in-PhotoLab image preview to be generated after a change was made.
That’s ridiculous.
Capture One is much slicker to use - same system, images, types of edits being applied etc. etc.
Edit: A word on export times: generally it takes 20-25 seconds to export an image from PhotoLab. C1 takes around 3 seconds.
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20-25 seconds per image export is very slow. Either you have very large images (>100 MP) or your machine is under specced. My 40 MP images (Fuji X-T5) with AI masks and highest denoise settings take 7-8 seconds on a Mac Mini M4 Pro base model.
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@GRD, please post one of your slow-to-export images and its sidecar so that we can test it with our Macs. Adding a few screens showing the settings could help too. Maybe your PL’s settings are not quite what they should be.
If the attachments are too big, use a cloud/share or service like wetransfer.com
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Capture One is faster at exporting yes, but then it does not have anything like DeepPrime.
What Capture One does way better than DxO is the user interface.
Simple things like panning a zoomed high resolution image in PL9 are visually jarring, (on an M1 Max) with constant stutters and stalls that look like the software cannot keep up. Capture One does this completely smoothly.
But what CO have done is to write a smart UI. If you look closely you see that the image at the edges starts off fuzzy (a low resolution image zoomed), before quickly snapping in to a sharp view. This kind of lazy update means that the UI feels fluid even when the rendering engine cannot keep up, and it makes the software feel much faster in use, even if the final rendering is not quicker.
This is something that DxO could clearly learn from (along with some other CO simple but very neat tricks, such as the ‘Quick Keys’ editing, where holding a key down while scrolling via the mouse makes basic adjustments - think global exposure/contrast/etc - without needing to jump to the relevant tool field each time).
DxO PhotoLab always feels to me like a class leading image engine that is struggling to break out from a very poorly implemented user-interface. And not just UI performance, but also things like undo-handling and the half-baked DAM functionality.
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