I'm trying to make a Panorama from four 2560 X 1920 photos. I plan on using DPCPrints to get it printed out 12 X 36 so I need to make good use of all available pixels. The problem is that unless I start off using only 25% of the originals, I run out of RAM. My system has 256meg which seems like it should be enough. Am I missing something?
the first thing i would do would be to exit out of all the little icons by the clock in the lower right corner of your desk top. right click on each one and look for exit or disable. this should free up some of your ram. if your computer is always on, reboot. some programs stay in memory even after you close them.....i hope this helps
meddic391,
Thanks for the advice but I already tried that. I'm getting the same error when I try just two full-sized photos. Will work at 75% though. Any other ideas out there?
you could try to increase the size of your swap file. the swap file is a section of your hard drive set aside by the o/s to act as memory. the problem with playing with the swap file is it's dangerous. you run the risk of not being able to reboot. a safer route would be to get another 256mb stick of ram and popping it in. also keep in mind that i am not familiar with the program you are using. there could be a way to solve your memory problem in there.
I have my hard drive partitioned and have a separate partition as the scratch disk. The size of the separate partition is 1.47 GB.
What is your photoshop usage set at in the properties (under edit)? I have photoshop RAM set at 50% of available RAM. I've read that this percentage should not be set over 75%. You might be able to play with this value and the size of your scratch disk to obtain an optimum setup for your machine.
Try and look at your available system resources when all programs are closed, then open photoshop, look again, etc. 256M SHOULD be enough, though I will bet it will page like crazy!
If you are running XP, do ctrl-alt-del and when task manager opens click on the "performance" tab, look under "Physical Memory". You can monitor as you open stuff.
I am running XP, until recently with 512MB, I've stitched as many as five photos without any paging. No experience trying it with 256, though...
Thanks to everyone for the help. I ended up setting the Photoshop RAM available to 90%. This allowed me to open three photos, the forth photo didn’t add very much anyway.
Looks like the real fix is to by some more memory. By the way I tried this on my home system running Windows 98 and my work system running Windows XP with similar results. Both systems currently have 256 Meg of RAM.
I wonder if I can get my boss to spring for some more memory???
You can get Photoshop to report different file sizes (current file, scratch size etc) in the status bar. There should be a menu dropdown there that lets you see more about what is going on. Not sure if elements has this.
Undo/ history things take up a great deal of memory. Purging the histories can free up a lot of memory, as can reducing the number of steps that you save undo information for (should be in the preferences)
Probably the least painful solution is to buy some more memory, but I see you mentioned it was a work machine.
Another approach that might work is to stitch two of the pictures together, close the result, and stitch the other two together and then combine it all in one final slow step.
If that doesn't work, crop the pictures to just the overlapping areas and work on those, then layer than on top of the final versions - work on as small an amount of data at a time as you can.
Thanks again for the help. Here is the finished product.
(The small size on the screen does not really do it justice)
I uploaded the full-sized 3600 X 10800 image to my portfolio but when I go to DPCPrints and try to purchase it, I don't get the 12 X 36 Panorama as an option? Is there something else I need to do?
I uploaded the full-sized 3600 X 10800 image to my portfolio but when I go to DPCPrints and try to purchase it, I don't get the 12 X 36 Panorama as an option? Is there something else I need to do?
Unfortunately you can't order panoramas through your personal print store. You will have to drop the public price to base rate, place the order, then put the price back up.
