Digital Light & Color

There are transformations that are more computationally intensive than others. But how much time/memory is spent on switching between transformations: saving previous output, loading new transformation, opening the previous output, and probably something else), versus executing transformations themselves?

Is it faster to run a single somewhat complicated transformation than several much simpler ones?

Switching between transformations is fast. Executing a transformation takes the bulk of the time, although in some cases there can be a performance hit from color management. Disabling color management of thumbnails definitely makes updating the image browser much faster.

All other things being equal, a single transformation that does the same thing as several simpler ones should be faster.

Disabling color management of thumbnails definitely makes updating the image browser much faster

This is an understatement - disabling colour mgmt for thumbnails speeded things up exponentially! Thanks!

Plus the new recalculations fix adds to it. Awesome.

I'm still amazed by how much turning off colour management for thumbnails improved the speed of recalculations. I tried other things to accomplish that, but their effectiveness pale in comparison.

I was thinking that it may be worth pointing it out for posterity by either adding a note/warning in the Colour Mgmt Settings and/or emphasizing it in Help.

For the next release, I changed the default setting of Color Manage Thumbnails to No, although this will not affect current installations. I also added an entry under General Tips in the help file.