I made a scan of a shirt for a texture file I was going try and use.  It's 2400 dpi and it's original size is 11x17.  The scan came out to a 1.6gb tiff file.  I'm running PS 7 on win xp pro with a gig of ram, and it coughed and died when I tried to open it.  Irfanview gave me out of memory errors as well.  Now I would just rescan it at a smaller resolution, but I'm wondering if there's anything I can do to change the file so I can work with it.  My scanner is at work and I won't be able to use it for the weekend...

... if anyone has any advice, I'd greatly appreciate it.  Thanks...

Did you try Irfanview Batch Conversion/Rename, Advanced Options to resize? It probably won't work, but might be worth a try.

No I didn't... awesome suggestion :)...

... unfortunately, Irfanview couldn't open the file...

The most obvious answer would be to rescan the material at much less than 2400 dpi.

Your scanner is probably doing interpolation to scan that high in the first place, and you really don't need that high of a dpi.

Try it again at 600 dpi if you really want some huge amount of detail. 

 - Noel

Yeah, that's what I'll probably end up doing... would've been nice to play with the texture over the weekend... oh well...

Attached Link: Image Analyzer

I have no real reason to think it will work but you can try Image Analyzer. It has some fetures for working with scientific images so who knows. It also has a really nice upsizing feature, better than most editors if you ever need one. You could also try Satori which is supposed to be "resolution independent," though darned if I know if that would help - maybe ask in their forum. 1.6GB is way huge though - you could probably scan Vicki lifesize at 300 dpi for less :-)

I'm surprised the scan completed.  How does you scanner software do, does it have image resizing?

You memory cap at this poin is 4GBs of RAM, 2 for windows, and 2 for the program you are using.  I doubt you have 3GBs of Virtual memory allocated(Or you'd know you'd have done that.)  So, you may try bumping that up there:

Goto Control Panel > System > Advanced > Peformance > Advanced > Virtual Memory.  There you can make sure Windows Opens with and Maintains 3GBs of VM.  You'll then need to restart you computer, at whcih time you'll notice 3 less GBs of Free Space, but then you can give it another whirl.

I'd leave this task for before you go to bed, head out for the evenning or something.  Then you can probably ecpect to do much of the same, one your image editor gets it open, as that large a resize is going to take time.

Your best bet may be to try to just save it as a .JPG, before even trying a resize.  Even at the highest quality I bet you could knock the file size back under 50MBs.

TIFF is a large format.  People will tell you a 1.6GB TIFF is way too uge, you probably would'nt get a Print Shop to touch it.  Or anything over 300 - 350 DPI for that matter.

It's 2400 dpi and it's original size is 11x17.

At 2400 DPI, an 11 x 17 image would be 26400 x 40800 pixels, so it's no wonder your file is 1.6 GB.

If your intent is to use it for a Poser texture, Poser won't handle anything above 4096 by 4096.

You'd be better off scanning it at around 150 DPI, which would give you a 1650 x 2550 pixel image; or even 300 DPI would give you 3300 x 5100 pixels, which would be a lot more manageable to start with.

converting to jpeg reduces file size as stored on disk, but it does not affect the actual size used by photoshop in RAM. as mentioned above, the size needed in RAM for such a file (8-bit colour at 4 bytes per pixel) is slightly over 4 GB, regardless of the scan file size on the disk.

FYI - You'd ned a 47 foot computer screen to see that image you scanned.

... ;  )

If you're using Photoshop, aside from resetting your Windows Virtual memory, you also have the option to Up your Photoshop Scratch Disk Usage  From Edit > Preferances >Plugins & Scratch DIsks you have the option to tell Photoshop to go to up to 4 different disks fo Virtual Memory.  By default only the first is set, to your Startup Disk, but I'm not sure if that even means the whole "C:" drive?

I did'nt hink there would then be that much a contrast from Disk to RAM??

rescan at a lower resolution/size? it's what I would do. Heck, I've never seen a file that large (but I don't get out much..;)

; )