To begin with, “finally,” a RAW converter that displays the brilliant colors available in various RAW files - I just love it, and am so glad to see ART being released.
However, is it me, or is ART ridiculously slow? I have 128 Gigs of memory on my Windows 11 PC, yet when I try to make adjustments to an image (in my case Fuji RAW files), the adjustments either don’t take effect at all, or it takes forever for the adjustments to be made.
How nice it would be that when making any adjustments, you can see the effects in real time - just like Adobe Camera RAW, or Lightroom, or any other RAW converter.
I can see that display-wise, ART is showing me dynamically colored images (realistic) that I have not seen in any RAW converter, but (again, in my case), what good does it do, if making adjustments don’t work, or take forever.
If your beef with RAW-converters is dull colors: you can easily fix that by adding “brilliance” (color saturation, brightness, contrast etc) to the standard/default settings after import.
In darktable (converter of my choice) you manipulate the values of a module, then click on the little burger top-right next to the module name and apply this modification to all images. Done.
I guess most other converters offer such an option, too, and someone here can explain how this is done in RT and whatnot.
Only apply noise reduction as the final step in your processing, it makes the update process of the adjustments much faster.
Also, the amount of RAM doesn’t make a lot of difference if you have enough (say 16 GB), the CPU speed and the number of CPUs do.
As for Noise Reduction, I haven’t even tried that yet. I’ve got everything to move a little faster, but right now it’s the slowest RAW converter that I use.
The only reason I mentioned Fuji RAW files is because I use that brand camera the most. The files I have are typically (depending on camera used) anywhere from 32 Megs (for the likes of the 16 MP Fuji X-E2s) to 48 Megs (for the likes of the X-T2).
If you’re using Fuji with ART (or RawTherapee for that matter), I highly recommend getting a custom color profile for both cameras. If you’re unsure what that is, there are some instructions here in the forums somewhere. You’ll be able to get Fuji colors and curves immediately.
Seems like it should be fast enough… What version of ART are you using? Windows builds, I assume, are for a generic CPU arch, and you’d likely get some gains by building yourself.
Thats a good thing to check because the default I think in ART is 0 or automatic…one would assume that it will try to grab as much as it can but its worth checking it out also there is one performance option in there to speed up rendering for ctl based controls and I am not sure if it would help elsewhere and how much it reduces quality but it could be another option for a little speed…
Hi,
it is true that ART is generally slower than many other alternatives, alas.
Some of the reasons for this have already been mentioned, like the lack of GPU support. However, on a reasonably modern machine it should still be useable. Of course, that also depends on your expectations though. And on the resolution of your screen (especially if you have a 4k display).
On any case, it would be helpful though to see a screen recording of a live session of ART on your machine, just to get a better idea of what you are talking about.
Where in ART does one find the noise reduction settings? I was looking at the Preferences and could not see anything that referred to NR. Can you direct me where to look?
Noise reduction is a processor-intensive operation, and if noise reduction is reasonably fast, then most other operations should be reasonably fast as well. It can be used as a baseline to tell what else is going on with your machine.
