PSE 6 Out of Memory in Editor

I've been processing ALOT of photos frmo 3 trips this summer and fall. All the images are in RAW. After processing the RAW and opened the image in Editor, I processed some stuff and then suddenly a popup appeared. Before I could really read it too well and write down the entire statement, it closed on me. But it basically said I'm out of memory in the Editor. WHAT??? I'm really confused. My editor won't open up now but the organizer will.

Any help on this would really be appreciated. I'm basically unable to proces anything.

Thanks.

How much RAM do you have?

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=49953

http://www.elementsvillage.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14528

I see you made a post over at the Elements Forums - hopefully that will yield some good help, too.

I've got 465 GB hard drive of which only 53 GB have been used so I have plenty of RAM. I shouldn't have to add more RAM should I?

Hard drive memory (data storage) does not equal or have any relationship to a computer's random access memory (RAM). Most computers come standard with 2 to 4 GB RAM, which are physical chips located on the motherboard of the computer. Many video/photo users bump their available RAM to somewhere from 4GB to 16GB since video/photo processing applications are memory intensive. Photoshop, Lightroom, and Elements are great examples memory (RAM) intensive applications.

Some software can use the RAM from a computer's video card to process data, but Elements and Photoshop do not do it (though the latest version of Photoshop CS5 might).

Also, running several applications simultaneously will take up more RAM, and leave less for software like Elements.

That said, you need to look for how much RAM you have, and also see if you can upgrade the RAM for your computer. That --might-- solve the problem

If you have more than one hard drive, you need to assign a 'scratch disk' to the one that doesn't have Elements and your OS on it. A scratch disk handles the overflow of data when you exceed your RAM (memory).
You can find that feature in Edit->Preferences->Performance.
If you only have the one disk, then you need more RAM or to work on fewer images.

Thanks for the info everyone. I shut down and rebooted. That seemed to do the trick. I was finally able to open the Editor and went to the preferences and performance. I enlarged the memory usage and realize now that I'll have to be careful on not overloading. I have 8 GB of RAM (not 465!!! DUH ). I'm learning! David, thanks for the threads. They helped. And John, thanks..every piece of info helps for people like me that are so computer illiterate!

Beth, you want to do the scratch disk that John mentioned, but it seems to me that 8GB should work for images. When you go to Edit-->Preferences-->Performance, also check and see how much memory (ram) is allocated to Photoshop... it'll be an easy-to-read bar showing the percentage. I would change it so that Photoshop gets 75% of your ram reserved when you start it up. Don't do more than that so things stay stable (by no means set that at 100%, you'll crash and have to reboot, lol!). Also, don't run other things like Outlook... when you run Photoshop, quit your other running apps.

Adobe isn't the best at memory managing its applications, they tend to eat up all available ram (I was encoding a short video and Adobe Media Encoder took up 10 of my 12GB of RAM, crazy). If you do hit that "Out of Memory" wall, you have to reboot.

Save often!

Thanks, Paul. Boy...computer stuff is comlicating and frustrating sometimes