Helicon Soft Forum

I recently returned an M3 Pro Mac Book Pro. One of the issues that I found is that Helicon focus was running slow, particularly when running as RAW in DNG out mode. The first time I ran the program on the Mac, I got a message indicating that Helicon would run under Rosetta 2. I was surprised because I assumed that Helicon Focus was optimized for the M processors. Is this the case?

Almost all the time is consumed by the Adobe DNG Converter (a standalone application) and GPU processing (not affected by Rosetta). And Rosetta itself is very fast. The performance difference between a native Helicon Focus version and the current one is barely measurable. So no, that's not the problem.

We would look into your Helicon Focus performance to check whether it is where it should be, but since you've already returned the hardware, it's no longer possible.

I agree with Catherine, if you compare the stacking times using other file formats (such as TIFF or JPEG) it's incredibly fast on Apple Silicone processors - so much so that it's big reason for choosing Helicon Focus over other software options.

The Adobe DNG Converter is the thing that's slowing it down (considerably) but the fact that you get a DNG output file is yet another reason for using HF, especially in the public and/or educational sector where open source archival file formats are required.