Digital Light & Color

I was working with a 56000x2800 16bit b&w on a Windows XP media center OS, 4GB ram laptop with PWP 5.0.1.18. Overlaying a 14 major, 5 minor horizontal grid. I moved the ends of the grid to positions within each end of the image by about 500 pixels. On hitting 'OK', PWP died. I duplicated the results, death of PWP, on a Windows 7-64bit, 12GB ram desktop with PWP 5.0.1.19. I then tried other large sizes. If the position of the end of the grid is not adjusted within the image, PWP survives. The problem exists with images generated with 'New' as well as my own files.

The goal is to continue to produce images such as:
http://www.dbdimages.com/photos/233962658_mJcSH-O.jpg
which I created in the past with PWP. Perhaps I was working with smaller images, but not by much. I've been trying to get caught up on processing this year's images when the little screen of death started appearing. Is this a new problem in recent PWP versions?

Dale B. Dalrymple
http://dbdimages.com

If any of the grid colors in not a neutral gray, PWP will create a 48-bit color result image which at your image dimensions would be almost 1GB. Even if the result is 16-bit B&W, you will have two copies of the image, plus space for the screen images, the program, and lots of Windows overhead. Since the current version of PWP is a 32-bit application, it does not benefit from frunning under 64-bit Windows. My guess is you are just running into the 2GB total address space for all running applications.

The example file I gave is a 314MB, 16bit, b&w. It is the only image open in PWP. The grid I was generating is black. Try it for yourself with a New generated 16 bit b&w 56000x2800 and default grid parameters. Adjust the left and right ends of the grid slightly toward the center. Then hit OK. This will kill PWP on either of my systems.

There is no ram problem here. Search the archives to check out my experience with using ram to it's 2GB limits and knowing what they are. The laptop I am using is the same as in my previous posts about processing large files, but with ram increased to 4GB total from 2GB so that system ram usage can't force any of PWP's 2GB ram window to be implemented virtually in slower disk memory

There -are- differences with PWP under Windows 7/64, it doesn't seem to do well. I'll post another thread for that.

Thanks,
Dale B. Dalrymple

OK, I found the problem. It should be fixed in a maintenance release.