Question for the experts on a Virtual copy in LR

[Paul2660]

In the past, I have taken advantage of the virtual copy feature in LR.  However last night as I was waiting for LR to refresh as I moved around an image at a 100% view (as long as 10 seconds per move) or make changes to an adjustment brush (as much as 15 seconds and several mis draws and lockups), I wondered if this was because I am working a virtual image?    I don't know anything on how LR is handling a Virtual Image, does it actually write a new file or is this image just in memory on the PC, if so I could see why adjustment processing might drag.

Just trying to figure this out as I created a pano from 4 IQ100 frames last night, and LR zoomed in perfectly on this image, no dragging or freezes and this file is much larger than the image I had created the virtual image from (3 frames from a D810 pano). 

On the virtual copy that was taking so long, I tried everything I could think of:

clear the cache,
close LR and reopen
reboot the PC
Moved the cache to a different SD drive
Increased windows paging to 32GB
overclocked my GTX970

Problems were about the same with the GPU support turned on or off.  One other other note, using the Asus GPU tweak utility, an monitoring my GPU, the maximum amount of processing that LR ever took was 11% and 1GB to 1.2GB of ram on a 4GB card.  No other app was open, so I am assuming that the majority of the GPU use was from LR.

PC has 32GB of ram, 3.2Gz i7 not overclocked. win 7 64 bit

Paul C

[rdonson]

If you had been working for a significant amount of time in Lr it could be you experienced the typical Lr slowdown.  It's usually solved by simply quitting Lr and opening it up again.  In my experience I don't think what you experienced was because of a virtual copy.

[Paul2660]

Hi Ron,

The interesting thing is that neither a restart of LR or full reboot of PC would fix this slow down.  This one Virtual copy was just taking forever and I check it this morning (PC off all night) same slow down as if the file is marked or damage or something.  Still exports fine and the original file that the Virtual was made from is slow to respond, but not glacially like the Virtual Copy.

Last night the PC almost went through the door, it was really not possible to edit this on file, as all the slow downs and freezes made it really impossible to tell where in the workflow I really was.

Paul C

[Chris Kern]

I don't know anything on how LR is handling a Virtual Image, does it actually write a new file or is this image just in memory on the PC

As far as I can tell (I also have no knowledge of Lightroom's inner workings), a virtual copy is just an independent collection of adjustments to be applied to the original raw sensor data.  No new file is created.  The "primary" set of adjustments and any virtual copies for all practical purposes seem to work the same way.  I frequently make virtual copies of panos and other high-resolution images and I've never experienced the problem you describe.  I would be more inclined to suspect some sort of database corruption, perhaps caused by a temporary hardware hiccup.  The way I would test this would be to revert to a back-up LR catalog and then try to reproduce the problem.

[john beardsworth]

I suspect it's this slowdown problem which I've seen associated with heavy memory usage on my own Windows system, and I very much doubt if it is related to VCs and certainly not database corruption.

[Paul2660]

Hi Chris:

I don't have a current back (last one is 2 weeks old and this image is not in that catalog) or I would try that.

But I have seen this often with other files.  I guess I have just reached a point of incapability with my PC and LR.  No doubt the entire LR can't work with my GPU well, even though its supported and seen by LR.  But this issue is enough of a problem for me to just move this type of processing to C1.  I don't want to do that, but after last night, I don't want to spend 2 hours attempt to make minor corrections to a file and having to wait as long as 30 seconds between zooms, moves or individual adjustment brushes.

With my machines, it just seems that as I add more adjustments (and I use quite a few at times), the processing just bogs down and once it reaches a really low point, I might as well delete the image, save the setting as a preset, (of course I lose the adjustments) and start over fresh.  I probably could have done that last night and been finished faster, but I got myself into a mental box trying to fix the speed.

Nothing more frustrating in LR than watching the little circle in the lower right hand corner spin around and around and all you did was attempt to move the present view (at 100%) and then wait 15 seconds, while the image at first appears, broken and blurred, then slowly start to appear in focus.

I still use only 1 monitor 30" with the default resolution of the NEC 2560 x 1600, and it may be that LR still can't work on such a large screen at that resolution (it used to be a problem with older versions and I always just minimized LR)

For me Open CL is a joke and neither Phase One (sorry off topic) or Adobe really can work with it with LR or C1 due to constant failures, where as Photoshop CC, is flawless, never hangs, zooms in out moves are smooth, brushes draw without hangs etc.  So I can't really feel it's my PC.  But for sure something is broken with LR and me.

Paul C

[Chris Kern]

With my machines, it just seems that as I add more adjustments (and I use quite a few at times), the processing just bogs down and once it reaches a really low point, I might as well delete the image, save the setting as a preset, (of course I lose the adjustments) and start over fresh.

I'm running OS X on a 2013 Mac Pro (currently the latest model) with 64 GB of memory and when viewing a really large pano 1:1, I typically experience rendering delays that can be quite lengthy — on the order of 15-30 seconds — but only the first time I zoom in; after that, I can move around the image at full resolution without having to wait for it to render and there is little or no delay in making adjustments.  I gather from your original post that this is what you're seeing with your "primary" image, and that the really painful delays are confined to virtual copies.

I just ran a test with a 52557x4451 pano that was stitched into a DNG by LR, and I couldn't detect any difference between working on the primary image and working on a virtual copy.  Both local and global adjustments seemed to take the same amount of time on both the primary and the VC: typically, I saw the effect almost instantaneously and rarely waited more than a second.  I would, however, expect the delays to increase somewhat if I made an enormous number of adjustments.  Still, based on my experience on OS X, I wouldn't expect the primary images and the virtual copies to behave differently.

I still use only 1 monitor 30" with the default resolution of the NEC 2560 x 1600, and it may be that LR still can't work on such a large screen at that resolution (it used to be a problem with older versions and I always just minimized LR)

I'm using two monitors, both NECs, a 27" at 2560x1440 and a 24" at 1920x1200.  I can't detect any difference in the rendering speed when I zoom in on one rather than the other.

I don't know how much of the Lightroom code is different between the OS X and Windows versions.  I assume the Adobe software developers attempt to do as much as possible above an abstraction layer that is common to both implementations.  However, one big difference is that there are relatively fewer component variations in an Apple environment than in a Microsoft one.  So it wouldn't surprise me if there was a much wider range of hardware-related behavior on Windows.  But, again, I don't understand why the performance should be substantially different when working on a virtual copy than on the primary image.

[kevk]

Th only time I see this super-slow-down behaviour is when I have used the spot removal tool a lot (maybe about 50-100 spots), once they are in there everything slows down when zoomed in on the image doing anything else after that.

Have you done a lot of de-spotting in your pano?

Kevin

[schertz]

Th only time I see this super-slow-down behaviour is when I have used the spot removal tool a lot (maybe about 50-100 spots), once they are in there everything slows down when zoomed in on the image doing anything else after that.

Have you done a lot of de-spotting in your pano?

Kevin

+1

Lightroom slows down like crazy if you do a lot of spotting! Although, one solution to this is to turn the spotting off after you are finished, do the rest of your edits, then turn it back on at the end...

[headmj]

I have had a similar problem.  I reset the preferences file and reentered my preferences and the problem went away. I also turned off GPU acceleration.  The driver on my machine seems to be problematic for LR but not PS.

[Stephane Desnault]

Lightroom usually works well enough for me, EXCEPT when I use the following:

 - Details and masking
 - A lot of spot healing (as mentioned above)
 - DEHAZE, and DEHAZE in the brush/gradient tools

DEHAZE instantly KILLS performance, it seems really, really processor intensive.

[Paul2660]

+thanks to all responses. 

Based on several tips to the spot healing brush, and number of spots healed vs performance, I realized that I was doing a similar thing. 

LR, auto mask, has great potential, but most of the times, even in a hard dark vs highlight selection criteria, it will miss just a tad and leave a bright edge to the image.  You can many times tweak this away by coming in @ 100% and using the auto mask and re selecting by attempting to click on just the white line.  LR gets it right for me about 50% of the time, the rest, you have undo and try again.  But all of these attempts I guess add up in memory.  In the same image I finally gave up allowing auto mask to make the selection and instead started to make a lot of small erases.  The subject was a dead tree with a lot of branches against the sky, so I just started to erase manually.  But each of these little brushes appears to act to LR similar to the spotting tool, in that they add up over time and eventually basically shut the program down at least on that particular image. 

What is strange is you can close/restart LR, even power off the PC, but the file in question still has the same slow speed as I guess all of those individual brush strokes, never seem to go away and give you a clear start, even by erasing the history, something I finally tried.

It really all goes back to one of the main complaints to Adobe, in that please stop producing new tools, but instead spend a bit of time on the programming around the current tools, improve the performance. 

The image in question was a short pano of 3 K1 raw, 36MB files, and it in it's own right did not clog up LR, but once I started to really tweak the auto mask errors, then that really blogged things down to the point of it would have been faster to just delete and start over, which I would do next time.  As cameras get larger in MP (soon 50MP will just be the standard) these issues will continue to happen.

It's also clear to me that my machine environment of a Asus board, and GTX970 all with latest firmware and a Intel i7 3.2GHz is not going to work well with LR with larger files if I am needing to make a lot of minor corrections to a large file. 

After all this happened, I went back to a file from last fall, D750, single but one that has the same dreadful deathly slow down, and it was the same problem, attempted to use auto mask on a girder bridge, but again auto mask left a slight light edge around some of the girders, thus I had to make repeated manual brushing attempt to fix it.  These manual small brushing seem to add up just like the spot tool and created a eventual slow down with LR, that really can't be fixed without a deletion.  On this D750, this is what I ended up doing and brought it into C1, where their Auto mask handles straight lines very well, (just not areas around leaves). 

Thanks again to all who helped out.

Paul C

[Chris Kern]

LR, auto mask, has great potential, but most of the times, even in a hard dark vs highlight selection criteria, it will miss just a tad and leave a bright edge to the image.  You can many times tweak this away by coming in @ 100% and using the auto mask and re selecting by attempting to click on just the white line.  LR gets it right for me about 50% of the time, the rest, you have undo and try again.  But all of these attempts I guess add up in memory.  In the same image I finally gave up allowing auto mask to make the selection and instead started to make a lot of small erases.  The subject was a dead tree with a lot of branches against the sky, so I just started to erase manually.  But each of these little brushes appears to act to LR similar to the spotting tool, in that they add up over time and eventually basically shut the program down at least on that particular image. 

You might find it easier, when you need to make many minute local adjustments of this kind, to first do the global modifications in Lightroom, then hand the image off to Photoshop or some other pixel editor.  There are times when it's just easier to work with a rendered image.

[kevk]

+1

Lightroom slows down like crazy if you do a lot of spotting! Although, one solution to this is to turn the spotting off after you are finished, do the rest of your edits, then turn it back on at the end...

Now that's a brilliant idea, I'll do it next time this comes up (soon no doubt).
Thanks for the tip!
Kevin