File size limit on photomerge?

Q
Posted By
Quale
Aug 21, 2008
Views
259
Replies
6
Status
Closed
I’m getting not enough memory (RAM) error messages attempting to photomerge or auto-align large images. Any other filter or tool that I need works just fine on these size files. Neither tweaking CS3 preferences (as has been discussed rather thoroughly on this forum) nor toggling the 3 GB switch under XP (my PC has 4 GB ram and >200 GB scratch) helped. Given optimal settings, what are the upper dimensions that I might reasonably expect to photomerge, either under XP or Vista 64? If it’s not unheard of to photomerge and auto align huge files, I’d upgrade my system. Otherwise, I’ll plan the upgrade and wait for CS4.

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KB
Kerwin_Bartinson
Aug 21, 2008
How about providing an image size and file size. I know at least for me Photomerge doesn’t like doing raw files. If I load them raw files in to Photoshop, do my ACR on them and then save them as tiffs I have no problems with the 14+MP images from my Pentax K20D.
PF
Peter_Figen
Aug 21, 2008
Hmmm. I’ve successfully used Photomerge in CS3 to put together four 650 mb drum scans I made from 4X5 negs. It took a while but it did complete. 8 gigs of ram here. Maybe that’s the difference. The final file size is over 2 gigs.
Q
Quale
Aug 21, 2008
Peter, your 4x650mb size is about double what my setup can do. I guess the extra ram does matter, even though CS3 is a 32-bit app. Kerwin, I use tiff format files for photomerges.
JJ
John Joslin
Aug 21, 2008
Scratch disk size plays a role too! Open a large file , duplicate a layer and look at the size of the file "Photoshop Temp12345678" on your scratch.
F
Freeagent
Aug 21, 2008
My impression is that "Not enough memory" is almost always related to scratch disk, and not RAM – unless the allocation is set too high in preferences. Going above 75 – 80% is probably not smart on 32-bit/4 GB.

Photoshop is fully capable of dealing with scratch file sizes bigger than available RAM – as long as there is enough free, contiguous, defragmented scratch disk space. Lots of RAM will speed things up of course, but in this case I would start with the scratch disk.

Edit: John types faster than me-
Q
Quale
Aug 21, 2008
FWIW, the error message about not enough memory prints out ‘RAM’ in parenthesis but doesn’t mention scratch specifically.

Even though the latest PSCS versions have implemented large document PSD format to handle 20,000+ dimensions, seems there’s a small number of filters and operations that can’t quite manage those size files no matter how much scratch is available. And I like the results of the latest photomerge.

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