Vanishing point filter crashes CS3

Richard

I am doing a composite and started using the Vanishing Point filter for the first time. It is not very well explained in the Help files, but I did find some tutorials on the Web that got me started. However, I am having almost continual crashes today and tweaking the CS3 memory allocation in all conceivable ways has not helped. I think it started when I added a second plane to the filter. Restarting PS does not help, as the filter seems to remember whatever caused the problem. Is there a way to erase its memory? I did manage to start over once by flattening and saving as a JPG, but soon got into trouble again, and in any event, I don't want to do multiple JPG compressions if I can avoid it.

TIA for any tips or help.

Wil Davis

If it's remembering the status when it crashes, it might be that there's a file left over from just before the crash, so I'd try to look for and delete the offending file. You might try going into the CS3 local directory (or its temp directory), look for the most recently created file and rename it (don't delete, just in case its the wrong file), until you prevent CS3 from getting to the crash point.

Sounds like sloppy testing on the part of CS3 QA…

HTH -
- Wil

Richard

Wil Davis wrote:

If it's remembering the status when it crashes, it might be that there's a file left over from just before the crash, so I'd try to look for and delete the offending file. You might try going into the CS3 local directory (or its temp directory), look for the most recently created file and rename it (don't delete, just in case its the wrong file), until you prevent CS3 from getting to the crash point.

Sounds like sloppy testing on the part of CS3 QA…

HTH -
- Wil

Good thinking, Wil. I looked for recently changed files and found one preference file for the filter that had been touched today. But deleting it did not fix the problem for one of the pics I am working on--PS must have something squirreled away somewhere else as well. It does work with new documents, though, which is a step forward.

You're right--it is sloppy Q/A and from what I can see on the Adobe forums, it affects CS4 as well and there is no consensus on the cause or the cure. :bash I guess it's just one of those features that is not used often enough for Adobe to take the time to make robust.

BradfordBenn

One thing that I did while taking a PS class that might help was use a thumbdrive/USB drive/flash drive as the scratch disk and that seemed to help some of the odd crashes I was having, cheap and fast. I used a 4GB USB2 drive and it was much faster than using the harddrive as a scratch disk. Might help with this issue. I never really found out what was causing the crashes, but this fixed it for me and was easy and cheap.

Richard

BradfordBenn wrote:

One thing that I did while taking a PS class that might help was use a thumbdrive/USB drive/flash drive as the scratch disk and that seemed to help some of the odd crashes I was having, cheap and fast. I used a 4GB USB2 drive and it was much faster than using the harddrive as a scratch disk. Might help with this issue. I never really found out what was causing the crashes, but this fixed it for me and was easy and cheap.

Might be worth trying, Brad. Thanks for the suggestion. I got frustrated enough with the problems that I just stopped trying to use the tool and used perspective adjusted crops instead. Even when it didn't crash, stuff that I pasted into a vanishing point adjusted layer was getting radically re-sized, and I couldn't figure out why. The whole thing may simply be due to my lack of understanding the tool, so at some point I may look around for more tutorials and try again. It really is a neat idea, if only it worked smoothly. BTW, here's a link to the pic, in case anyone is interested. As you will see, vanishing point lines are essential to the illusion. Most of the work depends on shooting the objects from an appropriate angle, but it would have been nice to have the tool for fine tuning.