It feels like I've gone to this same spot 50+ times waiting for some sunset color and it always fizzles out. Looking out over Glacier Gorge in RMNP. The fall colors on the aspens give this shot a little more to look at, but I figured I'd give this trail another shot since I was up there yesterday. This is 8 vertical shots stitched together.
I discovered an issue with photomerge on cs5 when putting this together. My 4gb ddr3 ram is apparently not enough and cs5 errors out saying that there is not enough memory to complete the task, so my blending doesn't finished after the alignment. I had to manually select 3 layers at a time and blend the layers in intervals. What a pain. I've tried all of the suggestions on the various forums, but none have worked. 8-bit, 16-bit, increasing alloted ram, decreasing it, etc. The same happens when I try to perform an average size on a content aware fill...error for not enough memory.
Just the single hard drive that's in it. It's a laptop, but less than one year old. Would you suggest assigning a secondary usb drive since I have one with over 300 Gb of available space?
Posted by Kalin Wilson on April 4, 2011 at 12:22 AM
Memory is cheap and easy to add/replace. Max it out but only if you're running a 64-bit OS. If you're still using Windows XP, 4GB is about all you can use since the OS is limited by the size of the memory address register. See this article for more info
As John mentioned you have a couple of options that are advisable for anyone. The OS uses your hard drive for virtual memory if physical memory is used up. Unless you have a LOT of physical memory or don't keep many processes active at once (hard to do with virus/security software, etc), the OS usually uses at least some virtual/paged memory. If you can devote a hard drive to only be used for virtual memory you can get a nice performance boost from the OS. Likewise, PS itself manages a scratch memory space so that it doesn't monopolize OS memory for large memory requirement operations. You can tell PS where this scratch file should be and how large it can be. So using an old 40GB disk (small these days) that you might have lying around or can find cheap ($25?), you can point both the OS paging file and the PS scratch file to it.
Comparatively, paging memory to disk is MUCH slower than accessing physical memory, so you should still install as much RAM as you can.
Good luck!
Posted by Kalin Wilson on April 4, 2011 at 12:29 AM
With laptops you have fewer options. Some, most, will let you expand the RAM, and some will let you add a second hard drive. If you're running windows 7 (likely) you can use a USB stick as auxiliary memory. You can buy an 8gb stick for $25 or so at Office Depot and the like. I'm not as familiar with the requirements and how the OS uses the USB device. I think it is pretty automatic if you have the right software or options turned on. I don't think you would be able to tell PS to use that device for scratch if it's being used by the OS for paging. If you just used the USB device as a drive, you might be able to point PS to it but I think that might be dangerous. If PS is using that for scratch and the device goes offline for any reason, OS glitch, stick removed, etc, it would probably crash PS, losing any edits that hadn't been saved.
An external USB drive as you mention would be better as scratch than a USB stick, but even USB 2.0 is pretty slow for virtual memory.
Discussion
4 repliesI discovered an issue with photomerge on cs5 when putting this together. My 4gb ddr3 ram is apparently not enough and cs5 errors out saying that there is not enough memory to complete the task, so my blending doesn't finished after the alignment. I had to manually select 3 layers at a time and blend the layers in intervals. What a pain. I've tried all of the suggestions on the various forums, but none have worked. 8-bit, 16-bit, increasing alloted ram, decreasing it, etc. The same happens when I try to perform an average size on a content aware fill...error for not enough memory.
Any suggestions?
Do you have a scratch disk assigned to handle what your RAM won't?
As John mentioned you have a couple of options that are advisable for anyone. The OS uses your hard drive for virtual memory if physical memory is used up. Unless you have a LOT of physical memory or don't keep many processes active at once (hard to do with virus/security software, etc), the OS usually uses at least some virtual/paged memory. If you can devote a hard drive to only be used for virtual memory you can get a nice performance boost from the OS. Likewise, PS itself manages a scratch memory space so that it doesn't monopolize OS memory for large memory requirement operations. You can tell PS where this scratch file should be and how large it can be. So using an old 40GB disk (small these days) that you might have lying around or can find cheap ($25?), you can point both the OS paging file and the PS scratch file to it.
Comparatively, paging memory to disk is MUCH slower than accessing physical memory, so you should still install as much RAM as you can.
Good luck!
An external USB drive as you mention would be better as scratch than a USB stick, but even USB 2.0 is pretty slow for virtual memory.