Filter image rendering times

answer #1: that will vary from person to person and there is no one single answer. me, i like filters to be as fast as possible and still get the look i want. if i have to sacrifice the look, then i'm reluctant to add speed. but, there's always a toss-up in any project, job or piece of work when talking about speed versus quality. spend too much time and nothing gets done. make it too fast and no one will buy it because of the crappy quality. so, it's always a toss-up. use your own judgement or sample opinions of the filter from the users.

I say personally: don't hesitate to upload them.

You should strive to make things run as fast as possible, read this: http://www.filterforge.com/wiki/index...nstruction
^^It's amazingly useful.

But honestly computers are only getting faster so if you had a great filter that might be a little too slow now, there will eventually be someone able to use it with no issues at all. (And if the final product is nice enough, people will be willing to wait enough anyhow.)

It's also important to keep in mind that filterforge is capable of creating enormous images: 65536x65536 (they state worked). No matter what you do in your filter it's going to take hours to render that size, so don't worry if it's a little slow in your smaller preview size since there's no way to tell what res people will ever eventually use.

answer #2: i believe it was vladimir that said they reject filters for speed if they cant be rendered on a 1 ghz machine at 600 x 600 pixels in 15 minutes or less. (that may not be exactly correct, so ask vladimir or find the post he stated this in to be sure).

i dont recall, jffe. i would assume it's whatever you sent it in as, but that's just a guess.

ok. well, one of the FF team shld really answer this. i'm just going by my poor, old memory here

It sometimes takes a lot of tweaking to keep the look you want while speeding things up. My Soft Watercolour was very slow to update, and though Vladimir himself (!) liked it, he made a point to address the slow rendering:

However, it has a significant problem -- speed. It's slow to adjust, and quick adjustments are a necessity for this filter, because its defaults don't look very well on photos with people and faces.

I worked a LONG time trying to speed up the filter without losing the details I wanted. In the end, there was a bit of compromise -- I didn't get exactly what I wanted, but it was fast enough to be no longer frustrating.

Of course, as Vladimir's quote implies, it also depends a lot of on what the filter does, what people will use them for, and how the presets look "right out of the box," as it were.

All this said: Quality first, but quality with speed is best.

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Beliria wrote: Question is when do I decide a filters not worth the time it takes to render? Irregardless of how nice it looks that is. And what is classed as to long a render time? Had a few that look really nice but have taken a minimum of 8 minutes to finish rendering.

Question is when do I decide a filters not worth the time it takes to render? Irregardless of how nice it looks that is.

Perfect question, it has happened to me sometimes that I see a really beautiful and interesting filter and it work well in a reasonable time with 600x600 but then I want to rise the resolution to 2400x2400 or 3000x3000 and it gets VERY slow and finally in the middle of the render I cancel it irregardless of how nice this is getting after about 20 minutes waiting.

AND I have FF 3.007 and a very fast and new CPU - Intel i7 Sandybridge 2600K Quad Core 3.5Ghz so this is not the problem.