NEF Raw conversion unacceptably slow

[RogerF]

I've been stacking in Photoshop, but just bought Helicon expecting a much easier life. I'm hoping I have something set up wrong, as when I load a stack of Nikon raw (NEF) files, it seems to take 20 secs or more to convert each one - and doesn't show a status. I seem to have to go through the stack list clicking on each image and waiting for the green circle to close. This is on a new Mac M4 Pro where most photo processing tasks seem pretty much instantaneous. I have it set to use the Adobe DNG converter. Any hints or suggestions? This can't be right, as if it's this slow I'll have to convert the stacks to tiff outside Helicon before processing, which would be a pain in the proverbial.

[Catherine]

Don't click each image in the stack, just click "Render".

[RogerF]

thanks, works fine - I dont know what that file loading process was, but it seems to be irrelevant

[Catherine]

If you want to view a source image you can click it and it will open. If it's the first time that particular image has been loaded, it has to be decoded from raw and that takes a while. After that it will remain available for subsequent access with no decoding necessary.
The rendering process does that in background and in parallel (using all the cores your CPU has), which is a lot faster.

It is indeed irrelevant for rendering the stack.