Back again, still having problems

[Wayne Parsons]

I just purchased Helicon Focus (5.2.7 Pro) and am having problems. I am using a Better Light scanning back for still life photos. At 16 bit depth the complete file size is 274 Megs per image; switching to 8 bit gives 137 Meg files.

I tried Helicon Focus over a year ago, but got side-tracked on projects with small images for which I did not need your software. But now I am working on different projects wih large files and am back with HF.

I am running Windows XP with 4 gigs RAM and a pretty fast dual core processor.

I loaded a stack of five 274 meg TIFF files (straight out of the camera, 16 bit, 6000 by 8000 pixels) into the program and hit “Run”. The error message says “Cannot load source image”, and this cycles through all 5 images in the stack. So I got nowhere.

I used Image Mode in Photoshop to reduce the files to 8 bit, saved all five files as PSD, and tried again. This gave me error message “Source image error” for all five files. Windows Task Manager shows the program is operating at about 600+ Megs of RAM. Again, no results.

I created JPG files also 6000 by 8000 pixels (8 bit, obviously) and tried again several times. Results are inconsistent. A few times the program gets most of the way through processing (the status indicator in the lower right corner says 95% complete) then stops. CPU activity drops to 1 or 2% and memory drops to 157Megs. Once the program generates a blended output file, but when I attempt to retouch the errors in the image I get error message “Cannot load source image”. A few times I got the “Cannot load source image” message as noted above. In none of these attempts did the program create a finished image, including retouching.

In Photoshop I reduced the file sizes to 3000 by 4000 pixels (about 30 Megs). Under this condition the program works, including retouching. But, of course, this is hardly satisfactory, as I acquired a Better Light back to be able to produce high quality detailed images. What do you suggest?

Is the best solution to buy a new computer with more RAM, Windows7 and a 64 bit system?

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Wayne Parsons

[Stas Yatsenko]

By default Windows XP provides only 2Gb of address space to any 32 bit application. And most probably this is reason for your troubles. You can switch /3Gb flag in XP to give programs more space, see here how to do this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows ... 87508.aspx

Windows 7 64 bit provides applications with 4Gb of address space so it is worth upgrading. You can also consider upgrading to Helicon Focus X64. This version uses additional process to allocate more memory and handle bigger files. It works for both 64 bit Win 7 and 32 bit XP.