focus stacking - panel closes after alignment done

[rdtindsm]

I do a fair amount of macro work and focus stacking has been a standard tool for some time now. It's a technique that takes a modest amount of preliminary work and the procedure is absolutely rote once the photos are loaded. No thought or additional manipulation required.

But I've been having trouble recently completing the process. Once I load the images into photo shop and start the merge process I see the progress messages about aligning the photos and the "untitled panorama - etc" tab appears until the alignment process completes. At this point, the layers panel with the thumbnails close and the "untitled image" tab closes, leaving only my source images displayed.

I am using Vista 32 bit on my desktop where I am having the problem and photoshop is CS5. I also have a laptop with Windows 7 (64) and both the 64 and 32 bit versions are loaded. Both perform as advertised for the focus stacking and I have tested with images that have previously been stacked, so excessive misalignment wouldn't seem to be the issue.

This may be a problem caused by some sort of spasm with a hot key or switch somewhere, but I have no idea where to look.

 

[RedneckR0nin]

It is taking you back to square one??
Or you can see the images in the layer panel to the left of the screen?

If your having problems photomerging try running it from Bridge first..I find it goes quicker and far less quirky even though I have never experience nothing like that before! Also you if you are loading from RAW files check your RAW settings on Bridge and Photoshop.....I had to tweak mine so that the color was left alone in display mode! If this does not answer your question at all then please take a couple snipping tool captures of your screen and post it up as I am curious about this problem and use photoshop and other stack exclusive programs all the time!

 

[RedneckR0nin]

As well it depends on your camera your using as well? Some older models don't have their images take to well to 64 bit editing programs!

 

[rdtindsm]

Yes, it is taking me back to square one. At the end of the progress messages about aligning the images, it flashes that it is creating the "unnamed panorama", then the panel closes. No progress is made into the "creating seamless composition" progress bar.

The test images are jpeg files that have been previously processed to stacked images, so it's not a camera problem. The camera is 8 or 9 mo. old while the problem is recent. IIRC, I have stacked raw, psd, and jpeg files. Using jpeg for test to save processing time and to prevent possible out of memory issues.

My other PS installations work. I have CS5 32/64 on my laptop, CS5 32 and CS4 32 on my desktop. The CS5 32 on my desktop is where I am having problems.

I just removed and reinstalled CS5 without fixing the problem. This is no big surprise. The files or registry entries that retain the state of the program aren't always cleared.

 

[Steve]

You may just have a corrupt preferences file, try resetting it.

Start Photoshop and immediately hold down Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Windows)
or Command+Option+Shift (Mac OS X).

Then, click Yes to the message, "Delete the Adobe Photoshop Settings file?"

 

[rdtindsm]

Steve: resetting preferences seems to have solved the problem. Many thanks

 

[Steve]

Excellent.

It's amazing how may different kinds of problems are caused by a corrupt preferences file.