RAW Developer 1.9 Offers Major Boost In Performance
I can testify that version 1.9 is indeed a major move forward in performance. Also it is one of the few programs that offer deconvolution sharpening (see Making Sharp Images). It’s well worth a try, see the download links below for a free trial.
RAW Developer author Brian Griffith reports:
I've finally wrapped up work on RAW Developer 1.9 and this release now runs at 64-bit on Mac OS X 10.5 or later with 64-bit capable Intel processors! All performance issues with 10.6 have hopefully been very well addressed as well. You should see some very significant (massive) performance improvements on recent Mac Pro systems running 10.6. On my 8 core system anyway I am seeing 4-6x faster image exports.
Performance gains on 10.5 and dual core systems aren't quite as impressive, but still substantial. File loading speed has also been very much improved. Image preview rendering speed too along with further refinements to the preview quality at scale sizes other than 100% (actual pixels). Hopefully all issues with the preview drawing getting out of sync on rapid zooming in/out/dragging have all be completely resolved as well.
You should now be able to export images scaled to absolutely huge sizes right up to the absolute file size limits of TIFF (4GB). You may be able to go even larger with some of the other image formats, but I haven't tested beyond 4GB yet. For my best system dealing with 4GB files in general is a bit of a struggle right now... time to order some more memory.
This release should largely address any performance issues you may have seen in the past on your systems and should take full advantage of every core and hyper-threading available on the latest Intel processors. File export is still limited to processing one file at a time though I did do some preliminary tests using GCD (grand central dispatch) and kicking off multiple file exports simultaneously which did show some minor benefits on the Mac Pro. Memory really is an issue here though and if by kicking off multiple exports simultaneously you exhaust real memory any performance gains are totally lost. With systems having less than 4GB (pretty much the vast majority of Macs right now) this doesn't look too promising at this point for squeezing much additional performance out of most systems.
This release adds support for all the very latest camera models including the new 80MP backs from Leaf and Phase One.
The new version is available for download here:
https://www.iridientdigital.com/products/rawdeveloper_download.html
Full release notes can be seen here:
https://www.iridientdigital.com/products/rawdeveloper_history.html
