CS4 photomerge is crashing my PC

I'm using CS4 to take between 12-20 photos from a scanning electron microscope and make a panorama with the merged photos. The individual photos are around 400k, black and white jpgs.

I find the photos in Bridge and rotate them 90 degrees clockwise since I take them in a vertical orientation but I want a horizontal panorama. I then go to tools>photoshop>photomerge and assemble the panorama. It usually takes 30-45 seconds to get the finished product.

I've been doing this for about 6 months, I did one yesterday, always predictable and quick with a horizontal panorama as the result. Today I had another set of photos to work on. But now, even though I have rotated the photos, PS brings them in from Bridge in the original vertical orientation. And now the process takes 10+ minutes and sometimes completely hangs up the entire computer and sometimes creates a weird, distorted vertical panorama. I've tried taking smaller sets of the photos and merging, it doesn't hang up but I end up with two vertical panos that are so different in orientation they don't match up when I try to merge them into a final pano.

These photos are no different than previous ones. No new hardware or software has been added or changed. The only thing I have done which is remotely connected to PS is deleting the Bridge cache to try and solve a Bridge problem I wrote about yesterday on this forum. Can anyone point me in a direction to go to solve this?

Hello. From your comments I would first look at three things to troubleshoot this issue.
1) What was different regarding how this series of images were captured?
2) Have you verified sufficient overlap/common pixels in the source files?
3) Delete the PS settings file on start.

I have encountered the situation you describe and it is most often from #2 above. Another subset of #2 is although there may be sufficient overlap there is not enough contrast for any type of real pixel matching.

For additional troubleshooting you have a few options.

1) In Bridge rotate the files and then launch the Image Processor to create a different set/copy of the files. This will ensure they are in the proper orientation. Then try the pano.
2) As a Windows user download a free copy of Microsoft ICE and try stitching your pano with that software. See how it responds.
3) Load the images into a stack from Bridge (select each image then Tools-Photoshop-Open files as Photoshop Layers. Once in PS, expand your canvas and manually place each piece in position. Using the Difference blend mode while moving the individual pieces helps. Once everything is in place, highlight all layers and then go to Edit-Auto Blend Layers. Use the Auto projection.

Cheers!

There is about 50% overlap in these photos because I've learned that, like you said, the contrast and detail in these photos is not nearly as much as in a standard photo. I'll try some of your suggestions, thanks for helping out.

No worries. Let me know how it goes.

There are a couple different ways of purging the cache. From what I've read, one works and one can cause problems. I haven't been using Photoshop much lately, so have no expertise on this, but maybe someone who has can chime in. What method did you use?

Tony I purged the Bridge cache by going to Edit>Preferences>Cache in the Bridge menu and clicking on Purge Cache.

How much memory do you have? What operating system?

As updates come down from Adobe and Windows, it is constantly reducing the amount of memory available to program. You may have been close before, but everything fit within the available memory. Maybe that has changed. You realize that those 400k jpgs are much larger when opened in Photoshop.

Kent Clark wrote in post #12479806
Tony I purged the Bridge cache by going to Edit>Preferences>Cache in the Bridge menu and clicking on Purge Cache.

Try closing Photoshop then holding down Ctl-Shift as you start Bridge and choose the purge cache option and see if that helps.

Memory issues normally do not manifest as the problem described. If you want to investigate the memory possibility go to Preferences-Performance and reduce Photoshop's memory allocation to @40-45%. Seems counterintuitive but it works well.