Performance: How can PSP improve?

[Nev]

Hi all,

Our R&D team is always looking for ways to improve the performance of PSP. I'm using performance in the context of actual and perceived speed, efficiency, and responsiveness of the app. Any observations or suggestions you can share would be great.

Best Regards,
The PSP Team

[csh2000]

Would love to see scripts run faster.

[Ken Berry]

The last two or three versions have a small but annoying fault which we have reported in consecutive beta testing, but it has not been corrected. On first opening PSP and clicking on a menu, the drop-down appears, but it takes a couple of seconds for the menu items to actually appear. After that first time, the drop downs appear immediately. As I say, only a small fault, but enough to annoy quite a few of us.

[brucet]

The desk top icon is an issue for many. Often users find they have to click on it more than once to start PSP. Apart from that just general lag in seeing adjustments as they are made. Speed, speed, speed, Real time viewing of changes. I often wonder if the change has worked only to find it pops up after several seconds.

regards

[JoeB]

In addition to what Ken Berry said, even worse in the speed department is that when you have a lot of plugins (mine spill over into Plugins 2) it takes a very long time for them to show up under the Effects menu. On my older machine it can take two minutes or more before I can access plugins, while other tasks are available much faster.

[DaveQ]

I agree with Ken on the delay for items to populate the menu drop-downs, and with Bruce where the desktop icon has to be clicked 2 or 3 times in my case for PSP to start loading.

[Zeitreisender]

...On first opening PSP and clicking on a menu, the drop-down appears, but it takes a couple of seconds for the menu items to actually appear...

I agree with you there. I tried the delay to shorten, as I have set the value of "None" on [Default] in "Customize" dialog box tab "Menu". As a result, the delay has somewhat reduced. When I run the program again later, the value of "Fade" was preset.



Please note: The following lines concern only the German version of PSP X9

1. Wrong Tool labeling
The labeling of the tool tips is wrong. Gradient tool instead of color fill tool, as shown:



2. Translated or not?
The options in the "Customize" dialog box are only partly translated into German text. In previous versions to X7 everything correctly in German. Since PSP X8 this is no longer true. Corel quality department? See the following figures from PSP X9 (pictures 1-5):

Customize (dialog box): Commands (1) > Toolbars (2) > Keyboard (3) > Menu (4) > Options (5)
In German translated it had called that: Anpassen: Befehle (1) > Symbolleisten (2) > Tastatur (3) > Menü (4) > Optionen (5)

I hope that the next version is completely in German again.

[Rick_R]

I agree ... with Bruce where the desktop icon has to be clicked 2 or 3 times in my case for PSP to start loading.

Are you sure that's PSP's fault? I'm the main person who maintains my employer's computers, about 15 2010-era Dells dual-core Pentiums running Win 7 32-bit with 3GB RAM, and a Dell server running Windows Server 2008 Standard (not R2). I often find that double-clicking icons does not start programs and I wind up right-clicking and selecting Open. We have many different brands and models of computer mice, so that definitely isn't the problem.

[Rick_R]

My usage is a bit different from most people. I use PSP almost exclusively for genealogy-related images, either scans of photos or images of historical newspaper pages or census records, etc., from Ancestry.

Something I have done a number of times is scan a relatively small class photo (around 2" x 3" or 3" x 5") at 1200 dpi then resize it to 300 dpi to wind up with a much large image. Then I start doing substantial retouching, with multiple layers.

With layers, the resulting images can easily reach 200+ MB. And when I'm doing retouching of individual faces, obviously that involves a lot of little edits.

What I find annoying is that I'll go to make an edit and PSP seems to freeze for up to 5-10 seconds before doing the edit. It's not actually frozen--it's saving the changes with auto-preserve. I did set my cache to an SSD but that really doesn't help as much as would be expected.

Is there a way perhaps to have auto-preserves, etc., run as a separate process/thread so they won't slow down edits?

[Rick_R]

Most serious users of PSP, Photoshop Elements, or similar programs tend to have higher-end video cards. Most current-generation transcoding software has options to use the GPUs on Nvidia or AMD video cards. How about giving PSP users the option to have PSP offload some of the processing to those GPUs for processes that are CPU-intensive?

[brucet]

Re the need to double click on the PSP Icon. I have many software packages on my 3 computers. PSP is the only one I have to double click on the icon. Not always but more often than not.

regards

[Jan Shim]

I have a fast PC so I don't actually have a performance issue with PSP X6 then and X8 now — running 32-bits instead of 64-bit for Nik Plugins compatibility reasons. To be honest, I rarely use much of PSP's core tools because of Nik and Topaz plugins. So if I had to suggest ONE area of speed improvement it would be quicker launch and execution of said plugins especially when editing large images.

[Cassel]

Personally, i find that some commands tend to be really slow when applied to large images (2000 pixels or more).

- Bevel
- contract a selection
- expand a selection
- smooth

I notice this as i often use those commands in scripts, and even while they run in a script, they are significantly slower than other commands.
I am using a computer with 8Gb RAM. It might not be a top of the line, new from last week computer, but i still see a major difference between those commands and others.

I am wondering if others see the same thing or if i am, again, the "lucky" one!

[GMack]

Please fix the color management so it works using external monitors and hardware calibrated screens!

As it is - and has been for several versions - it starts and takes over its own color management ideas and changes the screen color off of a hardware calibrated screen profile. It was mentioned long ago, the registry becomes bloated with other color profiles which is not needed yet gets called up even if CM is turned off in PSP X8.

It's the primary reason I have not upgraded from X8 to X9 is due to its bad color management that PSP X8 has against Adobe's PS which is stable and works with X-rite hardware, Eizo, etc. and doesn't change the screen's color on launching. The need to turn the computer off and rebooting to regain the hardware calibrated color profile, after PSP X8 messes up the color once it's started, is frustrating.

Mack

[Jean-Luc]

Personally, i find that some commands tend to be really slow when applied to large images (2000 pixels or more).

- Bevel
- contract a selection
- expand a selection
- smooth

I notice this as i often use those commands in scripts, and even while they run in a script, they are significantly slower than other commands.
I am using a computer with 8Gb RAM. It might not be a top of the line, new from last week computer, but i still see a major difference between those commands and others.

I am wondering if others see the same thing or if i am, again, the "lucky" one!

I confirm...
I add : I run a laptop Intel i7 2.50Ghz, 16 Go RAM and SSD 1To. When using the Brush or Eraser or Pen tool, there is a very long "lag" between the applying and the rendering on screen (too many seconds). When using the brush for drawing hair or many lines, I must wait before to see what I have done. It should be almost instantly.