I am a professional photographer who recently bought DxO PhotoLab 7 because I am trying to migrate away from Capture One and Lightroom.
However I am finding exports, INCREDIBLY slow on a machine that I don’t think is that bad.
I am using a MacBook Pro 16 2019 with a Radeon Pro 5500M and Core i7. I’ve enabled DeepPRIME acceleration.
I’ve added some images for context. But over 5 hours for only 92/128 images export is unacceptable. Yes I’m using DeepPRIME and I understand that it may slow down the export, but this is kind of ridiculous.
I mean I have a wedding to photograph next week which will have 3-4 times as many images. I still have my Capture One for now so I guess I’ll have to process and export on that.
I mean is this my fault? Should I have not bought this software because 2019 MacBook Pro with an i7 is now considered a potato? Did I waste $230?
Does anyone have any possible solutions to this that doesn’t involve buying a new computer or disabling DeepPRIME ? I don’t make enough to do that and DeepPRIME is like the Kian selling feature. But maybe there are some settings I don’t know about or some other factor I should consider?
(I’m posting this question from my phone since my machine is still exporting.)
What is the export speed like if you change the maximum number of simultaneously processed images back down to two instead of seven?
I have a PC with a i7 9700k (8 core/8 thread) and raising it over two slows it down measurably (8 instead of 7 seconds per image) and becomes painfully slow when going much higher.
Indeed. Over the course of 10 years as a DxO user and 4 computer systems I’ve never found any benefit from trying to force more than 2 simultaneous image exports.
@anon78744791@Sparky2006 thanks for the insight! I didn’t think anything about the simultaneous image export option as being a thing I should care about so I never experimented with it and kept it at it’s default setting, (which was 7)
I’ll have to try it with my next batch to see if it makes a difference, but it makes sense that computer resources would be better spent on an image at a time as opposed to exporting 7 simultaneously.
I also have noticed that when I do smaller exports in general, I don’t have this problem of things taking forever.
PhotoLab is relatively easy to learn, but bulk exports are not its strongest feature. As others have pointed out, the number of parallel exports matters - and the sweet spot seems to be between 3 and 5 on my Macs which are a 2019 8 core iMac and a 2020 M1 MacBook Air.
Export times also depend on other settings like e.g. distortion correction and one can speed up things launching exports for several output formats at the same time, e.g. if you want sRGB jpegs for posting and AdobeRGB files for printing. I’d not invest too much effort in trying to use PhotoLab’s printing feature though.
I recently did an export of 180 photos which completed in under 3 hours… which is still long… BUT not nearly as bad as it was previously.
I set the number of simultaneous image exports to only 1 as a control. I may run another test later with 2 and 3 just to see how it pans out.
I primarily work digitally thus far in my career and with clients, so I only export sRGB for now. I’ll cross that road for printing in the future perhaps, but ideally I may have a more powerful machine by the time I’m able to offer that service to clients.
I’m ok with slightly long exports, and I find 180 photos over 3 hours acceptable, especially considering the really incredible image quality I’m getting out of the exports. Plus I may be able to get that time down with some more tweaking here and there. The previous problem where it was talking 6-8 hours were too much but it seems user error was to blame, which is great! I’d rather ME be the problem than the software or computer.
DeepPrime and The RAW tools is a Game Changer for me and the resulting jpegs coming out look phenomenal, so I really want DxO PhotoLab to be a part of my workflow so I’m happy I was able to get some help with community.
Please if anyone else has more input to help me lower my export times, I’m ears, but largely this community has come through for me and I really appreciate it.
1 minute per image, seems pretty slow, but for it’s all relative.
I’m sure there are users on this forum who will be more than happy to be able to achieve 1 min per image.
In your case, and because you said that you are a professional photographer, I guess your needs are obviously higher…
Despite a bunch of already (and well) known issues in Photolab, exporting with DP/XD is pretty fast, if you have the good hardware.
By good hardware, I mean any decent GPU able to leverage the “AI” involved.
Either with Nvidia or any M processors for Apple, you can achieve solid scores.
Unfortunately, AMD is not a key player in this field, a GPU like yours is not the ideal one.
My M1 max (2yrs old now) can export an R5 RAW file in 10" using DP, or 29" using XD.
Using my 3yrs old PC with a middle of the range GPU (rtx 3070) is way faster (4" and 9").
There is a reason if Nvidia dominates the AI-GPU world…
If I were you I would just buy an “AI-capable” machine if the results you get are what you are looking for…
Keep in mind that my “old” PC which obliterates my M1 Max any day, “just” costed me $1300.
Compared to my M1 max, this is just 1/3 for double the performance
By any chance have you checked on the app store to see if Apple has released updated video drivers for your laptop? Over the past 6 months AMD, NVidia, and Intel have all made huge performance improvements in their drivers for Windows and Linux. Perhaps Apple has integrated these improvements into MacBook driver sets.
Still feels like a lot of time waiting.
My Macs usually complete an export of 60 images (with a total of 1.3GB) within 7-8 minutes max…but times vary depending on what needs to be done. With DxO Standard, deepPRIME and export to JPEG (all with default slider settings) and 4 images processed in parallel as well as editing this post while exporting, I got an export time as shown in the screen capture below.
@Sean.Wash , if you share an image and related .dop sidecar file (plus export settings), we could try to measure times against the ones you got. Maybe that your system is not in good shape (disk full, file system issues etc.)
Apple don’t release driver packages in the way it’s done on windows.
If any updates are done for the graphics in any way, It’s packaged into a macOS system update.
So keeping macOS updated will get you the updated drivers as well.
@Sean.Wash
1 mn per image is extremely slow with recent hardware.
I have photolab v6 windows installed on a worstation with 3xxx NVidia cards (not the last generation, but one before it) and with a not very recent cpu (but with a very good motherboard for its kind - not server class).
For one 45 mp image alone (from D850), it takes less than 8 s to apply deepprime and all lens corrections (nothing else).
Bonjour,
comme j’avais des doutes sur l’importance du GPU j’en suis revenu à une vieille configuration sur laquelle j’ai remplacé la carte graphique par une RTX3060
je n’exporte toujours qu’une image à fois mais par curiosité j’ai réalisé un test de 50 exports en DNG pour un total de 2.05Go
HP Z440, 64 Go, RTX3060, DxO Pl v6.11.0, E5-1680v4
voici le résultat
Thank you all for looking into this with me. I’ve been silent over the past few days because I’ve been prepping for a wedding I just photographed this weekend.
@platypus I’ve added an RAW File along side a .dop side car file if you or anyone on the forums would like to investigate my process. There’s no obligation, but I appreciate it if you do.
@Ian78 Ideally, I would just buy an M2 Macbook Pro if I could. Not in a position to drop that kind of money right now though, but it’s reassuring that the new computers are up to the task.
@JoPoV Like I said, acceptable, but certainly not fast. I’m still investigating to see if I can make that export time lower.
Files and Export Settings:
Here’s the export settings I typically use:
Exported the file twice with an average export time of 30 seconds.
A Canon CR2 file of similar dimensions (with more details) and your customising takes 32 seconds. Using DeepPRIME instead of DPXD shortens export times to 7.5 seconds per image.
Tested on 5k iMac 2019 with a Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB GPU.
I almost never use DPXD, specially not on three digit iso captures.
Exporting you test image: Base Model Macbook Pro M3 Max: Deep Prime; 4 seconds. Deep Prime XD; 8 seconds. Exporting multiple files would be faster per image than calculating the speed for a single file export.
This is a relatively expensive computer which I’m lucky to have. But as others have pointed out, less expensive options can do very well too. In general, the more powerful the computer, the faster DXO works, especially with Deep Prime XD. Most of the problems that people report regarding exporting speed have to do with the computer, not with the DXO software.
@platypus Thank you for investigating. I’ll just have to be less greedy around DeepPrime and just be more selective. In my mind, I always want the images to be as clean as possible for my clients as a way for me to stand out amongst my contemporaries, but returns are really diminishing and it would be better just to focus on the usual “good comp, good lighting, good exposure” stuff.
@richsfusa Hopefully I’ll be able to eventually upgrade my computer to an M-line Mac in the near future once my business can really pick up steam.
@BHAYT Hmmm… I may consider the option of just building a render farm essentially if the cost is right. It looks like NVIDIA cards simply work better than the AMD graphics I have on my current 2019 macbook. Thank you for running the tests and illuminating that possible option.
Out of curiosity I processed your photo on the base model 8 gb RAM Macbook Air M1 (2020)…which is available these days for $750 or less. Deep Prime: 8 seconds. Deep Prime XD; 12 sec. So that is a very inexpensive solution. Now, it may heat up and throttle at some point if you are doing 100s of photos at a time since it doesn’t have a fan. I never had that problem when processing 30 or 40 45MP photos at once from the Canon R5.
Well that’s actually more useful information than you know… Because maybe I could just get a Mac Mini M1 and use it strictly for rendering?
If I were to designate another machine strictly for Rendering only, would an 8gb RAM model be totally fine? I imagine the heavy lifting is being done by the CPU and GPU.
