Dark-field X-ray microscopy (DFXM) is a relatively new development in the field of diffraction-based imaging. As such, there is a variety of improvements, both from the experimental and data analysis perspective, that are necessary to study certain systems and understand the resulting images. This chapter presents two particular aspects that were necessary to overcome challenges faced, namely the detection of weak signals and real-time processing of DFXM data. A brief overview of the challenges faced during the study of thin films is presented to motivate the need to improve upon the detection methods used in DFXM. Additionally, the discussion of the volume and processing time of DFXM data is necessary to understand why computational improvements leveraging the parallel computation scheme of graphical processing units (GPU) are critical.