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. 

Lightroom 5? No, thank you (at least for now)

A while ago the Lightroom 5 has been released by Adobe. Since it is my application of choice for my photography workflow I wanted to test the new version. It contains quite some nice features that would make the post-processing even more efficient and better, just to mention the most important to me:
- True healing brush (not only spot removal tool),
- Circular mask,
- Image skew correction tool

With the new versions of any software product one needs to be a bit cautious: it might not be the best software the developers were intend to deliver. That is why we have "minor" version upgrades over time of almost each software package nowadays.
So I downloaded the trial and started playing with it. Actually, since it was time of my family portrait assignment, I decided to use the new version for postprocessing them.

Unfortunately, Lightroom 5 does not deliver a quality I got used to it with this product. There is an obvious regression at two areas: stability and performance.
With Lightroom 5 I experienced crashing of the application during regular activities: something I have never seen in previous versions (Lightroom 3 and Lightroom 4). Luckily the results of my work were never lost, but it slowed down the processing a lot.

Then the performance: using spot removal tool or healing brush tool was practically impossible in my hardware configuration. I was unable to move the brush smoothly over the photo, effects of applying the brush were visible on the photo only after several seconds after the movement - really not workable scenario.

I admit, my hardware (Windows 7 64-bit, quad core i5 processor with 6MB RAM) and photos that I take (36 MPixels) are challenging for efficient processing, but Lightroom 4 is a lot faster and more stable than the new product of Adobe!

So I decided not to purchase the newest version. I'll wait till they address performance issues. Final note: I am not alone having such experience, check out this blog.