Big Sur photo apps impact

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I've got PhotoLab 3, but haven't used it. I've been using Nik for years, since they first came along.

I did have an issue this morning, when using Nik, and that was my Nik layers weren't saving. (I was using Color Efx Pro when this happened.) I would have to save my PSD file, close Photoshop, reopen it, reopen the file, and then it worked normally. It didn't do it with Silver Efx. I'll give it a few days before going to Nik about it.
 
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Colin Grant said:
Nope - they're working on it. I have already ditched PhotoLab as it does not support Fuji X - the company does not always make one feel comfortable.
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As we know Adobe got and still does get tons of flack for LR going subscription. They have never done anything to me. They have always been accommodating.

Last year DXO kept sending me email after email to upgrade to V3. I finally did and two weeks later the BF sales came out. DXO told me too bad.

This year Canon released the R5. Even C1 Pro released RAW support within 3 weeks. DXO waited for 2 months so you have to pay for a version upgrade to use the software. They won’t get anymore money out of me.
 
Zenon said:
As we know Adobe got and still does get tons of flack for LR going subscription. They have never done anything to me. They have always been accommodating.

Last year DXO kept sending me email after email to upgrade to V3. I finally did and two weeks later the BF sales came out. DXO told me too bad.

This year Canon released the R5. Even C1 Pro released RAW support within 3 weeks. DXO waited for 2 months so you have to pay for a version upgrade to use the software. They won’t get anymore money out of me.
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DxO are not known for their fleetness of foot or accomodating approach to customer service.
 
Colin Grant said:
DxO are not known for their fleetness of foot or accomodating approach to customer service.
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I got it for Prime but didn't use it as much as I thought I would. I prefer to work under one roof as much as possible. I'm getting clean 10,000 ISO files with the R5 using LR. I set LR's ISO Adaptive preset to get me within range and often need just a little tweaking. For tougher NR I resort to Topaz which can create weird artifacts. PL4 came out with Deep Prime so I went back here to wake them up. :) Last post.

https://feedback.photoshop.com/conv...tion-feature-request/5f5f46144b561a3d427295da
 
For me the move to Big Sur is step one. That went well for me. Step two is to replace 2017 iMac with M1 Mini 16GB 1TB that will be hooked up to Dell UP3216Q Monitor. Can't wait. The Mini will reuse the RAID 0 set of SSDs via TB3 that I used with the iMac.
 
Pixelmator Pro 2 was released today with native Apple Silicon support. Affinity Photo 1.8.6 was released a couple of days ago and also does native Apple Silicon support. So for Big Sur that is the two main Ps alternatives now doing native mode Apple Silicon.
 
Something of an Update:

I did get a new Western Digital portable hard drive formatted to APFS to serve a dedicated for Time Machine Backups. Holy cow, what a difference! The first Time Machine backup took rough 1.5 hours...so much faster than the first attempted backup with Big Sur on the old drive formatted to HFS+. Hopefully, this means subsequent backups will be equally as fast.
 
Bill Ballard said:
Something of an Update:

I did get a new Western Digital portable hard drive formatted to APFS to serve a dedicated for Time Machine Backups. Holy cow, what a difference! The first Time Machine backup took rough 1.5 hours...so much faster than the first attempted backup with Big Sur on the old drive formatted to HFS+. Hopefully, this means subsequent backups will be equally as fast.
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Amazing isn't it. Subsequent updates should be lighting quick as it only updates changes.
 
Bill Ballard said:
I did get a new Western Digital portable hard drive formatted to APFS to serve a dedicated for Time Machine Backups. Holy cow, what a difference! The first Time Machine backup took rough 1.5 hours...so much faster than the first attempted backup with Big Sur on the old drive formatted to HFS+. Hopefully, this means subsequent backups will be equally as fast.
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These reports of fast backups are interesting and encouraging, because up to this point, APFS has not been recommended as a format for hard drives because it’s designed and optimized for how SSDs work. When a system boot hard drive is formatted as APFS, it tends to run slower than as HFS+. But these reports make it sound like the performance improvement of Time Machine on APFS is so great that it outweighs the lower efficiency of APFS on a hard drive. That could be true, since the structure of Time Machine backups was almost collapsing under its own weight on volumes formatted as HFS+…this Time Machine switch to AFPS has been long awaited by many.
 
I've decided to wait a while before downloading Big Sur until I've checked overall compatibility with other software etc. Can anyone tell me what settings I should have on my Mac desktop to prevent it downloading, but still keep everything else up to date? Thank you.
 
Conrad Chavez said:
These reports of fast backups are interesting and encouraging, because up to this point, APFS has not been recommended as a format for hard drives because it’s designed and optimized for how SSDs work. When a system boot hard drive is formatted as APFS, it tends to run slower than as HFS+. But these reports make it sound like the performance improvement of Time Machine on APFS is so great that it outweighs the lower efficiency of APFS on a hard drive. That could be true, since the structure of Time Machine backups was almost collapsing under its own weight on volumes formatted as HFS+…this Time Machine switch to AFPS has been long awaited by many.
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I had wondered about that as well. The experience I described is my initial backup on the APFS formatted dive - but it seems to echo what so many are experiencing. I remember when I first started with Time Machine, the very first back-up to a blank, new, drive took almost 16 hours. 'Normal back-ups averaged well over 2 hours. I back up to TM once per week, so this coming Sunday will be the telling of the tale...
 
Jan Emery said:
I've decided to wait a while before downloading Big Sur until I've checked overall compatibility with other software etc. Can anyone tell me what settings I should have on my Mac desktop to prevent it downloading, but still keep everything else up to date? Thank you.
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I don't think it will 'force' itself onto your system for a while. I held off on Mojave when it was first released for a bit, a few months perhaps, then downloaded on my own.
 
Conrad Chavez said:
These reports of fast backups are interesting and encouraging, because up to this point, APFS has not been recommended as a format for hard drives because it’s designed and optimized for how SSDs work.
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When APFS was initially released, It was only for MBPs with SSDs HDDs and Fusion Drives were not supported for APFS. Withe the next version of MacOS, Apple supported APFS on all drives and would convert your Primary drive on upgrading the OS keeping the data in place during the up grade. At that point I converted all of my Thunderbold HDDs to APFS. I have never seen a recommendation against formatting HDDs to APFS. Do you have an authoritative source (Apple) other than "they"?
 
I reformatted one HD (not an SSD) to APFS and Time Machine did the entire backup in less than an hour. I'm not a computer wizard. What about my external HD drives where I store my RAW files? I imagine APFS should be faster when I'm editing, importing and moving files to the ED? I have a portable ED as a third backup I update from time to time. Another safety net. Should I proceed or not bother?
 
clee01l said:
I have never seen a recommendation against formatting HDDs to APFS. Do you have an authoritative source (Apple) other than "they"?
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Here are a couple of links. The first is from a vendor of Mac hardware peripherals including storage drives; I own a lot of their products. The second is by the developer of Carbon Copy Cloner, one of the premier utilities for Mac bootable backups.

Using APFS On HDDs … And Why You Might Not Want To — macsales.com

An Analysis Of APFS Enumeration Performance On Rotational Hard Drives - bombich.com

The second link focuses on concerns with 2.5" 5400RPM hard drives, but relevant to this thread, those are popular for backups. The widely available bus-powered compact backup drives by Seagate and Western Digital are 2.5" 5400RPM drives. It does say “…performance difference is most noticeable on a macOS startup disk that is (or includes) a rotational disk” which is why I thought maybe AFPS is less of a problem on a storage drive used only for backup.

Looks like Apple doesn’t mention any concerns. Their file system article says “While APFS is optimized for the Flash/SSD storage used in recent Mac computers, it can also be used with older systems with traditional hard disk drives (HDD) and external, direct-attached storage.”
 
My FAT32 flash drives did not play nice with Apple's Numbers. It didn’t want to save changes. I keep my passwords on a stick. My guess the same would be for Pages and Keynote. I reformatted them to Mac. I only use these on a Mac so not a big deal. I might have been able to make some changes but it was easier just to format.
 
Conrad Chavez said:
If I understand it properly, if you already have a Time Machine backup on an HFS+ volume I don’t think it auto-converts that, but we now have the option of making new Time Machine backups on an APFS volume.

I don’t know what’s going on with the portable drive ejecting itself, unless it’s one of those cases I’ve heard about where a USB drive doesn’t stay mounted during sleep.
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Not sure if it is because of APFS or I'm using the other USB port the Air has not ejected the ED for a few days. I'm happy so far.
 
If you are interested in real world photo and video processing on an M1 Mac, you might want to watch one of the episodes of Photoshop Cafe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SndWxRaMzxA
 
Have now taken step two. My M1 Mac mini arrived yesterday. It has 16GB and a 1TB SSD. I moved my data drive (RAID 0 set) and Time Machine drive over from my 2017 iMac and had Big Sur migrate from the latest Time Machine backup. No problem. I did notice that now Creative Cloud offers me the Beta of Ps updated for M1. I have not installed it. So both LrC and Ps are running with Rosetta II emulation layer. So far, no problems.
 
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