I’m currently running PL5 and as an NEF and RAF converter it’s great, however I now have to ‘spot’ many digital scans of old b&w negatives for an upcoming publication. The Repair tool in PL5 is excellent - no need for Photoshop! -however, particularly at larger magnifications, moving round the image is slow and jerky. My current graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce GT1030, would upgrading the card speed this up? If so, is there a particular card you would recommend?
A word of caution. We scan in old, damaged, prints and find that, if there are too many repairs, PL can slow down and, sometimes, bomb. We reckon on exporting to a full sized TIFF every half hour and then working on the exported copy, then exporting again, etc.
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Thanks for your quick response but no problems with PL bombíng so far. My repairs are generally to small areas of the image at the pixel level i.e. spotting rather than full scale retouching.
We also only do majority small repairs, not restoration but, it all depends on whether PL wants to play and the “day of the week". Sometimes we can get away with lots of repairs, but it slows down. We do the TIFF “shuffle” because it runs faster with less repairs.
I do a TIFF export after repairing each image, just to be on the safe side 
Just have a try with less repairs per export and see if that avoids the slowness you are experiencing
So, after a bit of playing around, it seems that:
- Moving around the full size image (F4) is fast until you click on Repair
- Having Repair enabled slows things down, whether there are any repairs or not
- Having many repairs slows down things even more
- Exporting an image doesn’t help the speed but does protect from crashes (which I haven’t personally experienced with PL5)
My guess is that the speed issue isn’t related to the GPU but the speed with which PL can read its database, so the solution would be a faster SSD rather than a GPU upgrade.
I’d be surprised if speed of disk access had any significant impact on PL performance … It would be more likely that limited memory is the issue.
- How much RAM do you have on your system (Win or Mac ?)
Processor: Intel Core i7-9700 CPU @ 3.00GHz, 3000 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
RAM: 32.0 GB
OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
My opinion is that it is partly down to the repairs being recorded in the DOP as text values…
InpaintingActive = true,
InpaintingMask = {
{
CloneStart = {
0.32150065898895264,
0.39714702963829041,
},
FeatherIntensity = 25,
Opacity = 100,
PasteMode = "Clone",
Strokes = {
{
Path = {
0.31558060646057129,
0.39292681217193604,
0.31568324565887451,
0.39289188385009766,
0.3161124587059021,
0.39302894473075867,
0.3165881335735321,
0.39338904619216919,
0.31668746471405029,
0.39350965619087219,
0.31675291061401367,
0.39407888054847717,
0.31664657592773438,
0.39444202184677124,
0.31639963388442993,
0.39470800757408142,
0.31619882583618164,
0.39520078897476196,
0.3160172700881958,
0.39596188068389893,
0.3156164288520813,
0.39707908034324646,
0.31554877758026123,
0.39760255813598633,
0.31549769639968872,
0.39777302742004395,
0.31548601388931274,
0.39773008227348328,
0.31553173065185547,
0.39715281128883362,
0.31576371192932129,
0.39645203948020935,
0.31605285406112671,
0.39585438370704651,
0.31643003225326538,
0.39529561996459961,
0.31650489568710327,
0.39508748054504395,
0.31668102741241455,
0.39506933093070984,
0.31688463687896729,
0.39532294869422913,
0.31719213724136353,
0.39588555693626404,
0.31732681393623352,
0.39619287848472595,
0.31742501258850098,
0.39666521549224854,
0.31750485301017761,
0.39731693267822266,
0.31753534078598022,
0.39897382259368896,
0.31746000051498413,
0.39970695972442627,
0.31754404306411743,
0.40015384554862976,
},
Size = 15.026019096374512,
Type = "Positive",
},
},
Transform = {
1,
0,
0,
1,
},
},
This is for a small repair of an unwanted mark on a beam…
Every time the UI needs to be updated, this text has to be read and then converted into numeric values. If the repair is transformed, then the coordinates of all the pixels in the selection have to be transposed. Thus, if there are many repairs, this all takes time.
Do you get to work more reliably if you set PL to NOT import and export .dop files automatically? On manual, you can always export the .dop file without it interfering with your work.
Now, that’s an interesting thought. Personally, I always use auto DOP files, but it could be worth trying - as long as I remember to switch it back for regular use, as I don’t have the muscle memory to write the DOPs before moving stuff in Finder.
Also, it takes quite a lot of repairs before it bombs, so testing can be quite a pain.
Thanks for the suggestion, I just tried it but sadly on my machine running PL5 it doesn’t make a difference.
This means that the issue is not with handling the sidecars, but with image files, the database and with caching.
Agreed. To finish the work I’m doing I have gone back to Photoshop, which is a pity as PL5’s Repair tool is just as good as the Spot Healing Brush in PS. Will revisit this if I upgrade the GPU and/or SSD.
The graphics card’s GPU is not used at all for the repair tool in PL 5. The GPU’s only purpose is to speed up exports when DeepPRIME is applied to your images.
And unfortunately your card is very low end and probably won’t be used by PhotoLab for DeepPRIME processing either.
Mark
Thanks, Mark, that’s helpful. I would upgrade the SSD to give faster access to the database if it was definitely going to speed things up. However it still might not be as fast as PS (which is instant, even for the largest image magnification) so continuing to shell out for the PS subscription seems to be the only option.