I followed the various steps in Help for using HDR, in the "To merge to HDR Command" page. Step nine instructs me to press OK.
A box comes up, saying "creating File". The image on screen disappears, and I am taken back to PS without any open file. What happened to my file, where is it?
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Do you have enough distinct images with sufficient contrast range to perform the merge?<
I believe so. I used five shots bracketed one stop apart, from 2 stops over to two stops under. The middles exposure, when viewed in Adobe Raw convertor, exposure set to 0.00 correction, contrast -50 still showed clipping in both highlights and shadows. The 2 stops under still showed only a minute amount of highlight clipping on the same settings and some shadow clipping of course, the lightest (+2), showed huge highlight clipping and no more shadow clipping at 0 exposure correction and -50 contrast. That suggests to me there was more contrast inj the original scene then my camera (canon 5D) could handle, but that the 2 stops either way were sufficient to cover the range.
Do you get an error message? You should. <
An earlier test I used an existing exposure with high contrasts, produced 5 different RAW files in a similar spread, and when merging got a message ther was not enough "Different information ??" or something like that and that therefore the merge was aborted.
That made me set up the situation I shot as second test, where I put my camera on a tripod and took the 5 shots one stop apart. But when I merged, I did get the merge screen as described in the Help instructions, only to loose the result altogether at the completion of the merge. repeated three times with same result..
OSX 10.3
HD 13.5 GB free
Preferences set to PS using 70% of RAM. That was when I got a shock. It indicated my available RAM being 979 MB!
When i bought the Powerbook, I added 500MB to the original 500MB. Last year, through some mishap, I lost one 500 RAM chip, though a ‘burn-out’ caused by who knows what. When replacing it, I decided to replace it with a 1 GB Ram, so i had 1.5 Gb total. I remember the service agent showing this to me on screen as 1.5 Ram in place.
When I saw the preference settings today, I checked my Ram memory, and found one slot having 1 GB, the second being empty!. I cannot pysically check it right now, have no fitting screwdriver, and live in a place far from service shops. The Powerbook has been in three service shops in three very diferent places in the past year since the Ram upgrade, so i have to conclude eitehr the 500 Gb is there but doesn’t show up for some reason, OR someone in a service shop took it out! If so, I’ll never know which one!
Anyway, during the repeat of the merge effort today, the same thing happened. But while I was monitoring the process, I also watched my activity monitor, which sometimes showed Free system memory as low as 11 Mb. Then just before the end of the merge, a couple of seconds before the image actually dissapeared, the activity monitor had a red warning next to PS saying PS hung up.
Am I right in assuming I need more RAM to do this, or can i increase the memory available to PS to 80% or so? I’m a month away from my next visit to a place with service centres, so i cannot do much else at present.
Thank you for your response anyway, i’m not that technical minded, prefer to take photographs rather then struggle with computers.
That could very well be the problem. That’s not much free space. Take into account the swap file of the OS (Virtual Memory), Photoshop’s scratch disk (up to 35 times or more the size of your largest file), and the five images you’re merging are all competing for those paltry 13.5GB of hard drive space.
can i increase the memory available to PS to 80% or so?
No, no, no quite the contrary, PULL BACK to about 55% or less. You are starving the OS of RAM already as it is.
Yes, more RAM would definitely help, but more hard drive space is needed first.
How large is the drive? Anytime a drive gets to be 85% full you are already in big, BIG trouble, regardless of the size of the drive.
I shifted about 20 Gb of data to external drives, ended up with 35 Gb free. I then (before i got your mesage about ‘pull back to 55’ increased preference for PS to 80%, then did the same procedure, but saved at 16 Bit.
Saved OK.
After receiving your advice, I brought preferences for PS use back to 55%, still 35 Gb free HD, did the same merge, it crashed again, even taking all my tool bvoxes of PS off the screen.
I suppose next try is more RAM. I live in Vientiane (Laos). Nearest supply of Ram is bangkok, one month from now. I suppose I’ll have to be patient. Thanks for your support I’ll get back to you when I get to the next stage.
Yeah, something is weird here. We don’t know of any crashing bugs in MergeToHDR or the rest of PS 9.0.2. And we shouldn’t just finish the merge without an image or an error message.
If you can’t get MergeToHDR to work, I could suggest an alternative merge program called PhotoSphere (http://www.anyhere.com/). It doesn’t read as many file formats as Photoshop does, but the HDR merge is good.
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