Photoshop problem. Please help.

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Sorry to bother you with this but I'm truly frustrated. I have Photoshop 5.5. and Mac OS 9. (Waiting for photoshop 7)..anyway, I am having insufficient memory crashes when I scan. It occassionally works at 1000dpi but 2000-4000 it starts scanning and when it gets to around 66% it crashes and says; Unable to complete...insufficient memory. I have tried increasing the memory by highlighting the icon and going into get info - memory and increasing there but that is still not helping. If ANYONE can help me I would truly appreciate it as I have a bunch of Leica Images I need to get into my computer. Let me know and any help would truly be appreciated. Sincer

-- Gabe (egabe@earthlink.net), May 22, 2002

Answers

I think we need a little more info; Make and model of scanner, driver version, amount of physical RAM you have and the size of scan you are trying to output.

-- Johann Fuller (johannfuller@hotmail.com), May 22, 2002.

Are you managing Photoshop's scratch disks properly? How much free space is on your HD?

What are your Virtual Memory settings under the Memory control panel?

-- Preston Merchant (merchant@speakeasy.org), May 22, 2002.


Gabe-- What you're doing should work. There's no other workaround. My only recommendation is that you plug in the MAX memory, instead of something incremental. If you're still crashing, you must increase the memory. The only other problem I can imagine may be your total RAM-- you should be working off at least 512MG--I'm using 1.2 GIG. If your computer has 128 MG or less, you may not be able scan file sizes as large as you want...

-- Patrick (pg@patrickgarner.com), May 22, 2002.

This sounds strange, how much free disk space do you have? Do you defrag your HDD, and are you using a memory defragmenter like ramspace (windows)? Memory shouldn't really be a big problem, my wife scans at 2700 dpi with 128 Mb Mac's have a different approach to memory.

I would suggest scanning outside any other application, using vuescan for instance, as that is the most memory efficient way to do it.

-- rob (rob@robertappleby.com), May 22, 2002.


Gabe:

I have tried increasing the memory by highlighting the icon and going into get info - memory and increasing there but that is still not helping.

I run a dual Mac with 1.5 g and PS 7 with OS X. You increased the memory allocation to what? PS, your scanner software [depends on your scanner configuration], or to the clipboard. It is important to know these things. With OS 9.2 you don't need more than 512 to do this. With OSX you need more than 1000. Your information is too incomplete to answer your question.

Art

-- Art (AKarr90975@aol.com), May 22, 2002.



By the way:

If you are running a scanner with a USB connection: this is a slow connection and can't transfer information fast enough for large files. On some input devices, for large files, you will get the same alert. It has to do with the information input [this is a Leica site and not a computer site]. In such cases you need to reboot after every scan. Fix; get a scanner with firewire or SCSI. ;<)

Art

-- Art (AKarr90975@aol.com), May 22, 2002.


Photoshop is an application that eats RAM for breakfast, lunch and dinner. For it to perform optimally you need to have an amount of RAM available to Photoshop that's 3 to 5 times the size of the image you're working on. Don't bother trying to create 'RAM' from free hard disk space this ain't gonna work like the real thing. 512 MB is a nice starting point for Photoshop 5.5, more is even better.

-- Bert Keuken (treb@operamail.com), May 22, 2002.

Gabe,

There's insufficient information in your query to suggest what's wrong. The quick and dirty answer, which often is exactly right, is that you have either or both of insufficient RAM and insufficient free disk space available for Photoshop and the scanning plug- in to work correctly. But that's not really a good way to answer this without knowing:

- What Mac do you have? - How it is configured (RAM, disk space, free disk space)? - You're running Mac OS 9... which version of 9? And is Virtual Memory on? What size have you set VM to? - How much memory is allocated to Photoshop when it's running? - What scanner are you using? with which driver? - What scanner plugin software are you using with Photoshop?

High resolution scanning (I'm presuming from the numbers you've offered that you're working with a high rez film scanner) takes a LOT of memory and free disk space to work successfully. Photoshop also manages an internal pseudo-VM scheme to handle low memory conditions which competes with the native OS VM system when disk and RAM space are critically small.

I recall that when using the plug-in for my Minolta film scanner and Photoshop 5.5, the MINIMUM acceptable RAM setting for Photoshop was suggested to be 100MB, but I found in practice that at the very least 150-200MB was essential to error free scans at 2820 ppi. Things got much happier with 512MB and greater.

BTW, Photoshop 7 is now shipping, updates and such are all available over the counter or through net order now. Set up a system with Mac OS X, VueScan, Photoshop 7 ... Have a lot of RAM and a lot of disk ... Scanning nirvana!

Godfrey

-- Godfrey (ramarren@bayarea.net), May 22, 2002.


Godfrey:

Yeah; I presently have 160 gigs of free disc space. I am in a time warp. I have two copies of PS 7 on a sectored disc. There is no OS X driver for any of my scanners, so I run them on the latest version of OS 9.2. I then run PS on OS X. I am suprised how little problem there is converting between to two OS's. I can't remember when such a large change in OS's worked so well.

Art

-- Art (AKarr90975@aol.com), May 22, 2002.


I would second the call for Vuescan-- or anything else besides the Photoshop plugin for whatever scanner you're using. I use a Nikon Coolscan, and I had problems with the plugin. (It's frustrating doing a high-resolution scan in four passes of a 6x6 slide only for the program to crash when it tries to save.) The standalone software works fine, though.

Cheers, Dave

-- Dave Flanagan (dwf@caltech.edu), May 23, 2002.



I have a Nikon Coolscan 4000 and Scan 3.1 with a Mac (OS 9.2) I never, ever, scan directly in PS. I read somewhere that the PS «acquisition module» (or something like that, I don't remember the name) is buggy and should not be used. Instead I scan in Scan 3.1, saving the scan on my HD, then I open the scan in PS. Maybe that's where your problem lies. Try it.

-- Olivier (olreiche@videotron.ca), May 23, 2002.

Gabe,

Check the VueScan website, http://www.hamrick.com/ to see whether it supports your scanners. If it does, you don't need anything else to use VueScan directly under Mac OS X ... And then you eliminate a major source of problems. VueScan is much more efficient at doing scanning than a plug-in in Photoshop can be ...

-- Godfrey (ramarren@bayarea.net), May 24, 2002.


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