This weekend I started experimenting with scanning some of my 8x20" negatives in two halfs with my Microtex i800 and stitching them together with the photomerge command in Photoshop CS2. Typically, I scanned at 1200 ppi to give two 8x11” 1200 ppi (16 bit) grayscale tiff files, which were each ~ 250MB. I ran into several issues.
Problem one is that Photoshop needs to convert to 8 bit to stitch and I’d prefer to keep the stitched image at 16 bit until I am done working on the image. The second problem is that I ran out of memory with the full-sized files. While merging the files, Photoshop gave a message that it was out of memory (RAM). I’m running Win XP with 2 GB of RAM and a 250 GB external (USB) drive as a scratch disc. How am I out of memory?
If I downsize the files to 600 ppi Photoshop stitches them fine. Anything bigger, and it chokes. A trial version of Panorama Factory V4 refuses to even open the big files so this software seems totally useless to me.
What are others using to stitch big files from ULF negs and is there software to stay at 16 bit until all editing is done? I’m a novice at this and need advice from others that may have a way to do this.
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