Slow TIFF Performance in Windows 7

Posted on December 10, 2011 by Axel

Some FastPictureViewer Professional users have been experiencing excruciatingly slow performance when displaying certain TIFF files. The issue was in the Microsoft TIFF codec that ships with the operating system and Microsoft now fixed it. The fix also cures Windows Explorer hangs when opening folders containing some of those TIFFs. The correction will be part of Windows 7 SP2 and is currently available as a hotfix. See the Knowledge Base article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2619291/. The Hotfix request pages is here: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=2619291

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What happened to FastPictureViewer Pro during 2011?

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Axel

Year 2011 was as busy as ever regarding the development of FastPictureViewer Professional and a good part of the work done on the product was made in response to customer feedback and suggestions. A big Thank You to all those who contributed! Continue reading →

Posted in Codec, Metadata, Performance, Photo, RAW, Windows | Leave a comment

FastPictureViewer Codec Pack vs. Microsoft Camera Codec Pack

Posted on August 13, 2011 by Axel

If you have any interest in raw shooting you must know by now that Microsoft has (finally!) delivered its own add-in enabling support for raw formats in Windows Explorer and Photo Gallery.

The first questions that come to mind are is it any good? Is my camera and my operating system both supported by this new package? How well does it run compared to other similar products? Continue reading →

Posted in Codec, Computers, Metadata, Performance, Photo, RAW, Windows | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

A Step Forward in the Universal Image Metadata Quest? (A call for a New Container Format)

Posted on May 21, 2011 by Axel

The Metadata Working Group, a consortium of leading companies in the digital media industry, is working hard to establish metadata interoperability standards. The benefits of such a gigantic effort are obvious but adding metadata within existing image file formats is less than evident as most of these formats were never designed to be edited in-place. This is true of the JFIF container, used to store images compressed in the ubiquitous JPEG format, as well as for TIFF and all TIFF derivatives (DNG, TIFF/EP, and all current camera raw formats such as Canon’s CR2 or Nikon NEF, just to mention two).

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Posted in Computers, Metadata, Photo, Windows | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Building a photography PC workstation: which processor?

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Axel

One of the most often overlooked aspects of computer performance for image processing is the size of the processor cache. Sure, the clock speed is important and so is the total amount of memory in the computer as well as the speed of the disk drives, but image processing algorithms crunch through huge amounts of data – millions and millions of pixels – and their speed of execution is bound to memory access speed more than by any other factor, assuming reasonably well-built mid-range-or-better computer.

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Posted in Computers, Performance, Windows | 4 Comments

[PR] Add-in Enable Support for RAW Image Formats, Adobe DNG, Photoshop PSD in Windows Explorer

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Axel

Geneva, Switzerland, February 10, 2011 – Swiss software publisher Axel Rietschin Software Developments released an updated version of its FastPictureViewer Codec Pack product, a Microsoft Windows add-in enabling users to display raw images from more than 350 digital camera models, as well as Adobe DNG and Adobe Photoshop documents, directly from Windows Explorer without launching a dedicated application.

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The More Cores the Better

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Axel

Current imaging software (as of 2010) may not use all the available CPU power everywhere they could on multicore or multiprocessors computers. Batch export or batch conversion is one such areas where modern apps are most likely to take advantage of multiple cores, and the next limiting factor is likely to be the disk subsystem: batch processing eight 25MB raw files concurrently on a 8-cores system (two Quad processors) requires at least 200MB/s of sustained disk I/O throughput just to make sure the CPUs will never be out of fresh data, a level of performance that very few system are able to sustain.

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Posted in Photo, Windows | 1 Comment

Optimize Windows Performance, from XP to Windows 7

Posted on July 17, 2010 by Axel

This subject matter has been beaten up so much, one can only wonder if there is anything more to say on the subject… My advice is going to be a little different, though: basically, don’t do anything. Well, almost.

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Posted in Windows | Tagged , | 4 Comments