Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

I am told by my supplier that I have the fastest processor they can sell me, coupled with plenty of memory and an SSD.

I don't do all that much printing though I appreciate all the improvements Mike is making. Well done.

What I would benefit from is any and every improvement in the time it takes to create and recreate a RAW cache. I have learnt the lesson of loading the folder into QU as early in my work flow as possible so it can create all the caches. What I find frustrating is how long it takes to make a new one when I have changed a white balance or a fill (for example). I know it might only be a few seconds but when you are keen to do the next stage of edit it can feel like ages.

Tony

The raw developing routines have already been optimized all the way down to machine cycles.  Given the DCraw processing, lens correction, noise filtering, color profiling, and sharpening being done, it just can't go any faster.  One tip I would give is to try to edit your raws in batches if you know you have more than one.  For example, if you have 4 raws to edit, select all 4 and use the multi-refine feature where you can click to move to the next once you are done with the first, and so on.  That way when you exit the refine tool, all four raws will be developed at the same time and because QU uses multithreading, it can build 4 (or up to 7 or 8 depending on the CPU) in the same amount of time it takes to build one.

Regards,
Mike

That's what I do. First, I will usually copy white balance from a grey card shot to the majority of a batch, say 50 to 100 shots and then select 4 at a  time to refine, sometimes 8. Once they are refined I'll select the next 4 or 8 - and work on the new ones as the previous set are cache building in the background. By the time I've refined the last set, most are ready.
Terry

Thanks guys.

I vote that my best  tip for 2016.

I always used Batch RAW Refine to copy settings from one RAW to the batch. I never thought of altering a RAW and moving on to the next - and then, once the batch is corrected, calling up another batch. I had not realised that batch two was workable as the cache for batch one was being done in the background.

I have an eight core machine. Does that suggest I'd be better off working in batches of eight?

That advice will go a long way to satisfying my wish to move the Fill slider a point or two one way or another - noted in my other 'wish'.

Thanks again.

Tony

Yes, definitely.
I have a 4 core, 8 thread processor and have tested again the speed of rebuilding 4 and 8 raw image thumbs.
Although with Multi Threading Preferences for image processing set to Auto it was quicker with 8 images that doing two separate sets of 4. I got a much better result when I set Multi Threading Preferences for image processing to 8 threads. It was approximately 30% quicker than two sets of 4 separately.
Of course, there were no other programs open or doing stuff during the timings.

Try doing the timing yourself but use images without filters and any extra refinement to get a true comparison.
Terry

One little tidbit that can help.  If you have an 8 core system (QU shows the number of cores on the splash screen when you start up) and you have multithreading set to "Auto", it'll use 7 cores for processing.  It leaves one core unused for the main UI so that it doesn't slow you down if you do other things while thumbs/cache are building.  So the optimal setup would probably be to keep multithreading set to auto and do 7 raws at a time.  That way you have one core free to move on to the next batch of 7 and refine those without slowing you down.

Mike

Thanks again guys.

This going to speed me up so much.

Just done a 100 shot lunchtime event so I can try out doing 7 RAWs at a time on this one.

Tony