PHOTOMERGE PROBLEMS

Each time I try to use Photomerge (Edit/Automate/Photomerge) I get a message telling me that either the merge can't be done or, more annoyingly, "ya don't have enough RAM, pal!".

I do have enough RAM. Does anyone know what's going on here?

BA

Are you running in 32 bit mode or 64 bit mode?? What platform? How much RAM? If you are running in 32 bit mode, you will not be able to take advantage of all of your RAM. Depends on which platform what that number will be.

And are you trying to merge 16 bit or 8 bit images? How many?

I'm running 32 bits and have 4GB of RAM on a PC and a laptop. Neither will handle Photomerge, while a mate of mine with 1GB of RAM on an old Mac can do this with no problems.

I'm trying to merge 8-bit images.

Barry - A few things :

-- How many images and what size images (in pixels)? Both of these will affect the amount of RAM needed
-- How much RAM do you allocate to PS? (It's in the settings) Make sure it isn't cranked way down for some reason - it should be about 2.5 GB.
-- Which version of PS? I think the 32-bit mode of CS4 and/or CS5 can't actually use as much RAM as older version under older version of Windows and OSX.
-- Either way, you can only access about 2.7 GB max of the RAM with the 32-bit version of the tool.

One thing to try is to just take two of the images and try to merge them - if that still doesn't work, something else is wrong.

As you said, you don't need all that much RAM for simple merges, unless the files are huge. I'm running Vista on a 4GB machine and I've stitched about 30, 10 megapixel shots in CS4 (although I did jump through some hoops to do it).

Thanks for the help David.

I'm running a 32-bit system on Windows XP. The two files are 60mg tiffs, each 3744 x 5616 pxls. I've cranked PS up to 90 percent in Preferences/Performance in CS4. Are the files too big?

Hmm...that doesn't sound too big to me Barry, but I don't quite know the ins and outs of Photomerge. I usually merge my RAW files directly and they are only about 10-15 MB. Just as an experiment you could try shrinking them down to like 1000 pixels on the long side and making them JPGs, and then merge them. That will give you tiny files and guarantee that it isn't really a memory problem.

I'm not sure what else could be doing this, but have you tried resetting all of your PS preferences (hold ctrl-shift-alt while starting PS)? That will clear anything weird or corrupted out - and will reset everything so you may lose some bind keys or something.

Barry....Are you using a separate (empty) hard drive for your scratch disk or your C drive? You might want to check your settings. If the hard drive you are using for your scratch disk is 3/4 full or more, this may be causing the problem. As they say..been there, done that, and ran into the same problem.

One other tidbit to toss in there is to do the merge as the first thing you try to do when you open PS. Once I've done a merge, I close and restart PS before trying to do the next one. Clears out the history, or something like that.