Harddisk space and merging photo's (panorama's) - weird!

Hello-hello,

Got a quick question:

Every time I select a couple (like 8) of photo's in Lightroom and go Photo->Edit in-> Merge in Photoshop, I lose TONS of harddisk space. Like right now I'm trying to stitch them together and it literally cost me 2GB of harddisk space. How's that possible? Does it get saved anywhere or...? I didn't even save the file yet and I got warnings that my harddisk was full (even though I still have 4GB left).
Because I didn't shoot the panorama straight I wanted to angle it so that it was level again with the free transform tool, but then I started getting those warnings that I didn't have enough free harddrive space. Does anyone else experience this problem? Where do these files get saved to? Because I sure as hell didn't...

Regards

4GB isn't much space to work with. Your scratch file will grow in size with doing that much work - as well as possibly a temporary file being created, and paging file possibly increasing.

You need more hard drive space. Also, what kind of HD?

Numenorean wrote in post #13992320
4GB isn't much space to work with. Your scratch file will grow in size with doing that much work - as well as possibly a temporary file being created, and paging file possibly increasing.

You need more hard drive space. Also, what kind of HD?

It was the standard drive that came with my MBP. So it's just a scratchfile? But 4GB is quite a lot. More than 8 RAW files together...

Each raw probably is getting rendered to a 16 bit tiff - for a 5DmkII each full size 16bit TIFF is about 125MB. So, multiply that by 8 and you get about a Gig, plus the scratch disk is probably going to require double that, so 2GB is not unreasonable.

Try exporting your panoramic segments in Lightroom as something smaller, like 8bit JPEGs at 2400 px along the long edge and then do the photo merge fom within Photoshop. See if this helps.

If you have external drives connected you can designate them as scratch disks and make those drives with more space the priority drives, and de-designate your MacintoshHD main internal drive.

kirk

TijmenDal wrote in post #13992967
It was the standard drive that came with my MBP. So it's just a scratchfile? But 4GB is quite a lot. More than 8 RAW files together...

Sorry, but 4GB is rather small in computing terms these days.

I don't know how Mac's handle their paging and whatnot, but I can easily eat up 2GB in Photoshop with a single RAW file. It saves histories, etc. and those take up a lot of space depending on how you have it setup.

4gb is insignificant when stitching an 8 image pano. I have a 4 image pano which is a 480mb .psd file in Elements (the full size jpeg is 26.1mb). In order to end up with a file that large, it had to be using a lot more memory than that when it was being processed - I have 424gb free plus 1gb of dedicated video ram on my graphics card.

Your pano has double the images that mine has. 4gb is basically no space at all for temp and paging files during processing on a project that large.

You shouldn't operate a computer with that little disk space free if you want performance too.

kirkt wrote in post #13994586
Try exporting your panoramic segments in Lightroom as something smaller, like 8bit JPEGs at 2400 px along the long edge and then do the photo merge fom within Photoshop. See if this helps.

kirk

But then I lose the power the RAW files give me. I export them from LR, so would it be better to open up all the pictures with layers in photoshop and then do the photomerge? Or wouldn't that make a difference at all? Or I could resize the images in photoshop, but still maintain RAWness. I was planning on stitching them together first and then doing the PP.

Dude, you seriously need more storage space already.

Either upgrade the internal HDD in the MBP or get an external one and follow kirkt's instructions above.

mrwalker wrote in post #13995836
Dude, you seriously need more storage space already.

Either upgrade the internal HDD in the MBP or get an external one and follow kirkt's instructions above.

What would be the minimum amount of HDD space I'd need?

TijmenDal wrote in post #13996330
What would be the minimum amount of HDD space I'd need?

External hard drives run about $100 per TeraByte. If you have USB3 or Firewire800 on your machine and external drive could be a good option.

However, if you only have 4 GB of internal disk space, I'd say you are seriously low. Do you have a way of adding an internal drive?

tonylong wrote in post #13997776
External hard drives run about $100 per TeraByte. If you have USB3 or Firewire800 on your machine and external drive could be a good option.

However, if you only have 4 GB of internal disk space, I'd say you are seriously low. Do you have a way of adding an internal drive?

Yeah, I've been thinking about removing the optical drive from my MBP, but if I do that I wanna do it good and remove it, put an SSD there and upgrade my HDD to like a terabyte. Problem is I'm a poor college student and pretty much broke so... And an optibay+SSD+HDD will run me 250€ at least and I'm not to keen on spending that.

I already got an external HD though (2TB), but it's just USB. I removed some junk from my MBP and now there's 30GB free space - can't say I'm noticing any difference.