Waiting on long filter processing. Force Quit or wait?

I'm waiting on a filter to do its thing - as Photoshop plugin. Been about 30 min so far.

Is there a way to tell if a filter is actually still alive or just crashed?

Its the "Glowy" *? something at A4 res. Alas as I've command+tabbed to other apps in the meantime theres no progress bar to be found..

THERE MAY BE A PROBLEM WITH THE FILTER AND HIGH RESOLUTION

AS PHOTOSHOP PLUGIN 7000x7000

Well after nearly 1 hour waiting for something to happen on the way fr om FF plugin to Photoshop, I had to cancel it using Esc key because it seems that it will not work.

This is weird and do not know why this happens, because using the filter in reduced mode view works right and using other filters it works well.

STANDALONE MODE 7000x7000

I have tried to use the same filter in standalone mode with the first default presets and an source image of 7000x7000 and after waiting half an hour NOTHING happens and does NOT appear any part of the image, so it seems to be frozen somewhere.

STANDALONE MODE 2500x2500

Trying to lower the resolution with an image source of 2500x2500 it works very well without any problem and does not get frozen

STANDALONE MODE 4900x3500

When using an image with 4900x3500 and switching to "Actual size" view, something appears but then later it gets frozen sometimes, and in 20 minutes only shows a tiny part done.

I have the latest version of FF 4.0.9 February 7 and using Windows 8 64 bit and Intel i7 Quad Core 2600K 3.5Ghz

Well one of the biggest reasons is that there is a lot of blurs in this filter...One or two can slow down a render at that size let alone what this filter has...
So if I were to give a definite reason why its slow are all those blurs..

Some filters that are heavily based on bitmap components never finish rendering. I confirm that and confirm we're looking into the issue.

Retoucherpro, have you checked if it is set to use all available cores?
It´s under Options>Rendering.
I sometimes set it to use only one core, when I need to do other stuff while it renders. If I forget to set it back, I wonder about it´s slowness next time, until I remember lol

And sorry about the slowness of my Glowy filter. I tested it on fotos and a 4096x4096 texture before I submitted it and it worked just fine for me, only slow.

There is an obvious bug only on the mac platform in reference to rendering above a specific size. And its been known for at least a year in reference to the plug in "paint HDRtist" Such a great plug in, and pretty much the reason I bought the last upgrade of Filter Forge. I thought that it was my computer speed or ram etc... But I upgraded computer and ram etc... and still the same. I only recently read through the comments about the plug in, ... http://www.filterforge.com/filters/10787.html , and found that people where having this issue a year ago?..

So annoying!... There should just be a different price for the mac users if the mac version is going to be restrictive compared to the PC version.

At the very least it should be available to everyone to know of this restriction in the mac version before anyone attempts to purchase it. I know I wouldn't have purchased the latest upgrade if I had known this.

So does this happen with all plugins?...or just some?.... So annoying.

Ok, just speaking on my part, on every software forum I visit excepting a couple there's always bound to be an argument stating some software X is slow in doing task X. Mentalray according to some people, is slow. Even Vray, according to some folks, is slow. I work with all sorts of software everyday, VFX related, motion graphics, you name it. I have to deal with "slow" all the time and you gotta rethink your strategies. FilterForge is no different. I do admit, sometimes I do think FilterForge is slow, but I work with that. I feel like complaining, but I'd be complaining about every software I'd be using, so I don't.

These forums are naturally a place where people post about sluggish speeds, it's ok to do that. But the forums should also be a place where there are solutions as well, and I'd rather help people out than leave arguments around. I just need a bit of openness from people than facing a wall of bitterness.

My case and point:
1. Things do run slow... if you just let them be.

2. There's no such thing as "instant". Software companies demo "instant" a lot but in reality, it's hardly the truth. We work long hours to make "instant" happen. I optimize tons of things so demos would run smooth, so games would run smooth, so shaders run really smooth. I sometimes feel people get the false impression about "super fast render speeds" based on some company tech demo... the reality is really harsh.

3. There are always ways to shorten render times. <--- Ladies and Gentlemen, workflow optimization is a major portion of my job.

4. I can help!

Yuya... First of all thanks for offering to help, you sound like you probably would have lots to offer too, so hopefully you might be able to shed some light,... I personally look for inspiration or direction from anyone who offers any thoughts on problem solving.

But I have noticed you became defensive in response to a similar comment I made here .... http://www.filterforge.com/forum/read...sage125871

I'm not sure why your so sensitive to truthful negative "constructive" criticism. I don't think I was being too hard either.

Just because i'm saying how it is... doesn't mean its not constructive, in fact thats the very reason why it is.

[QUOTE]3. There are always ways to shorten render times. <--- Ladies and Gentlemen, workflow optimisation is a major portion of my job. [QUOTE]

Too be honest I think that is obvious. ( I like how you categorize it as workflow optimisation, hits the nail on the head). There is no other way to work through graphics software, other than workflow optimisation... and the software you use should help in optimising your workflow. And Filter Forge does ,.... as I have said before, if it actually was working properly, with out that bugs.

I have been working with photoshop since the beta version before version 1.0 , so thats close to 25 yrs.

Over half my age.

If the file is 4000 x 4000 or bigger in size, it seems to be too much for it. If it's close to that size but smaller it can take for ever to render...or just render half way and then freeze. If you get to a much smaller size ..everything is fine it works well.

Now if this was to happen in mental ray and only happen for the mac users and not for the PC users..or UNIX users... There would be lots to hear about in forums from the annoyed mac users trust me.

I believe there's one price for all users on all platforms, so I don't think its much to ask to have the same features working just as fast or slow on all platforms... Having the Filter Forge freeze and not render on the mac and having it render fine on the pc is not a small thing to not worry about... Unless its only happening to me..and the few others I have seen mention this around the forums. (even still why is it happening to us?)

It would have to be something in the compiling of the software over to the mac version. Something to how it addresses ram, but I'm not skilled enough to make an accurate guess,...but seems to do with Filter Forge accessing the ram.

It might be a really hard thing to fix...I'm not sure I don't have the knowledge to comment on that. How ever there has been reports of this for a long time. And it seems to be ignored? I wonder, if it was ignored possibly because there wasn't anyone making a big enough fuss?

I wish there was more like Retoucherpro, to make even the smallest comment. Negative or positive. There hasn't been enough people speak up.

I was one that didn't speak up,. I actually thought it might have been an issue with me not having enough ram, but I have lots more now and still no go. It might only be a few of us that this happens to..or it might be a hell of a lot.

We won't know unless there is feed back from people. Maybe the lack of feed back shows that there isn't many others, other than the ones that have spoken out already........... or it could mean people just gave up and moved on.

There is a reason why I'm spending all this time typing this out and expressing my thoughts.

I am motivated to NOT walk away because I believe in this powerful software and am attracted to the way it works, and I think its unique and nothing else on the market like it.

But if making it better,.. or saving it from becoming virtually worthless (to me personally at least), then I find no problem giving honest feed back in a relevant forum. How ever short..... or long,.. that feed back is

Yuya

My comments are/were not aimed directly at your work. Like oreosPaul I have been in the industry a LONG time and on a variety of hi and lo end equipment used to render graphics of all sorts. I'm USED to waiting a longish time for something to render out or a filter to complete its cycle. When FF first came out I was quite excited about what it could mean to a lot of different industries that deal with creating graphics of any kind. But I held off then because it was just too slow for the work that I do.

Now...... well, things might have changed in some areas with FF and what it can accomplish. Truly amazing stuff. And some filters are wickedly fast and give me something that I can tweak from.

And some are just wickedly slow..... and I don't think that its the person who created the filter's fault at all. There is some computational heavy stuff going on. I just feel that the creators of FF need to do something to make their product a bit more optimized for ALL systems to accomplish their claims resolution free creations. When I have to wait over 26 hours for something and then finally give up because its only half way rendered then in my opinion FF has failed. I have the technology to run this....beyond what the recommended setup is... way beyond. On this day and age there is no reason why FF can't make the jump to GPU based or assisted processing power. Its necessary.

I love the promise of FF and envision what it should be doing. I just hope that it WILL do that someday. I too have been using PS since '91 and have seen some tremendous stuff happen that I never dreamed would be possible...

My comments are not against you or your filters....just FF.

Chris

Here it is 2022 and Filter Forge is still slow as molasses. I've read through several threads that attempted to address this issue (all the way back to 2008!), but all I've found were excuses or personal battles and arguments on semantics. Why is Filter Forge agonizingly slow when rendering? I think this software has really great attributes, but the speed in which it renders is a dealbreaker. I just can't do this anymore. This issue needs to be addressed at the engineering level and I'm puzzled as to why a fix hasn't been created yet. It's only been years this issue has been prevalent.
ARRRGH!