Elements, Panorama, and Memory

Lare

(I suppose I can also ask this question on the Adobe forums, but frankly, I typically find the answers here come faster and with more information so I'll try NRF first.)

During an expensive but pleasant trip to King's Canyon NP, I decided to try a panorama shot--something I'd never done before. I carefully set up the manual exposure and levelled my tripod before taking a series of 5 shots around about a 180 degree field of view.

At home I set up the panorama stitching feature on my copy of Photoshop Elements 11. I opened the 5 files and started the feature. After a few minutes of grinding away, PSE said something to the effect of "You don't have enough memory" and gave up.

I have a fairly new machine running Windows 7, an i5 processor and 12G of RAM. Is this really not enough to do something like this?

Also, I noticed that, despite my attempts when shooting, the exposure could have been a little better in one of the pictures. Do you recommend adjusting the picture before trying the merge or making an adjustment after merging?

sevencrossing

I think you can assign how much memory PSE uses, so this might need adjusting
all exposures need to be same and no adjustments made until you have merged the image; then add a horizontal graduated filter

Golf007sd

@Lare: The problem is not your ram but the application. For such work have a look at PTgui.

As for the image adjustment, I would apply them to images first before merging.

Good luck and hope to see the finial image on PAD.

Lare

Hi, sevencrossing
You're right. It's possible to assign the memory. I'd forgotten about that. But it leads to a different problem: In the preference box for amount of RAM to use, it shows I have 3G available, and that PSE can use all of it. But my machine has 12G installed and I can't find any way to change that setting.

Hi, Golf007sd,
I wasn't aware of that program. I will check it out. This sojourn probably won't make it into PAD, though, it was just a first time thing. I'm one of those odd individuals who takes most of my landscape shots at the tele-end of my zooms so I have a lot to learn about panoramics!

sevencrossing

Remember, Elements is like CS5 but with the best bits removed
so they may have deliberately restricted its performance

Lare

Give that poster a cigar!
I hadn't thought about Adobe setting the limit low, but from your post, I dug around on their site and found that, indeed, PSE is limited to 3.2G when the OS is 64 bit. (Because PSE is still running as a 32 bit program.)

Boy, first I don't get content aware fill and then I can't use all my RAM. It's like they want me to spend more money or something.

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. It doesn't fix the problem, but at least I can stop wondering where my other 9G of RAM went.