23 Nov 2013

onOne Perfect Photo Suite 8 - what isn't addressed in this release

onOne Software has announced the new version of their Perfect Photo Suite software.
The new features are quite exciting, but I was also interested in the performance of the software. In this post I describe my findings with respect to the performance of the version 8.
I am not going to repeat what is new in this version, I think it is best to check the official announcement of the product on the onOne webpage.
The software will be published on 26th November 2013. In the meantime there is a public beta 3 release available for download.
I took the opportunity and tested the beta version for a while. I was in particular interested in the performance of the newest version. The version 7.5 is not fully usable on my setup when I process the high resolution images.
So what is my setup? It is Windows 7 64-bit OS running on Intel i5 Quad core CPU, running at 2,66GHz and having 6MB RAM on board. Sure, not the most powerful machine, but also not the weakest one.
The problem is that I work with the images having resolution of 36 megapixels. Such images on my computer in onOne software are very challenging to process when I try to use the tools like masking brush or masking bug; the software becomes slow and hardly responsive after several brush strokes. And using perfect brush simply freezes the application for a longer time (2-3 minutes).
So when version 8 was announced, I was hoping that the performance would be better.
Unfortunately, it is not the case. It looks actually the same as in 7.5. Which is a pity.
On a positive side: the new tool, called the Perfect Eraser, works reasonably good and remains responsive despite the complexity of the drawn shape.
Note, that the situation I have described is quite specific (most probably not everyone works with 36 mpix images). And version 8 is the step forward when one looks at the new features and overall improvements. But if someone considers purchasing the new version in order to boost the performance, he might be disappointed.

By the way, I learned to deal with my issues by combining the usage of onOne with Photoshop. Whenever I need accurate mask, I create it in Photoshop and from there I run the onOne. Not the perfect solution, but it works. 

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