Nik HDR Pro 2, Mac OS 10.6.8, LR 4 - kernel panic!

[NancyP]

I don't do HDR that often, but there are some night Chinese lantern scenes I am working on. Launch 5 to 7 tiffs at 1 stop steps, program combines those into 32 bit space, I pick a particular rendition, hit "save" - kernel panic! I have used this program in the past and it didn't act like this, and really I haven't changed much, other than my disk is getting fuller (57 Gb free, last time I bothered with HDR I may have had 100 G free). This seems to be consistent behavior - more than half of my HDR attempts are doing this. Cold reboot several times.

Why o why?   

[Simon J.A. Simpson]

This might help:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT200553

I guess you've done the usual repairing disk, permissions, etc..  You may also be running out of memory or free hard disk space which might cause the software to barf.  Taking a look at the system logs might give you a clue as to what might be causing it.

[rdonson]

According to Google (who owns Nik now) the system requirements are:

Mac:

Mac® OS X 10.7.5 through 10.10
Adobe Photoshop CS4 (CS5 for HDR Efex Pro 2) through CC 2014
Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 through 13 (apart from HDR Efex Pro 2, which is not compatible with Photoshop Elements)
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 through 5
Apple® Aperture® 3.1 or later

[NancyP]

Thanks. My Nik is pre-google era, and has run well before. I am seriously considering this as a "space" issue (57 G free on the disc at the moment). I can't make much of the error log. Lots of processes with numbers and letters after them, no error code telling me what it means - all it says is "kernel panic" (old fart that I am, I translate this to "extension conflicts" in the pre-OSX era). I haven't done the disk repair and permissions bit yet - I was too annoyed last night, went to sleep. Also, maybe I should re-run the disc image, it could be that the unzipped program got corrupted.

[rdonson]

Those are what Google publishes as the requirements for Nik HDR Pro 2.  If it ran before then maybe you can revive it with what you're proposing.

[jerryrock]

Apple stopped supporting Snow Leopard in February of 2014. It's time to update.

[degrub]

Time to invoke the magical pram reset ?

[NancyP]

    Yep, I am lazy. This laptop is connected to the internet so infrequently that I just haven't bothered keeping it up to date. I need to locate a Mavericks installer so I don't have to putz with "TRIM" issues on my third party SSD boot drive. Apparently Yosemite and forward will be hostile to third party SSD boot drives.

I really should be putting more effort into pruning the catalog, applying keywords to the surviving files. It's much more fun to play with individual images than to do the housekeeping. So, I will ignore the HDR until I clean up the disc to make some more space (I'd like 100 G free at minimum), and then install Mavericks, or learn about "TRIM Enabler" and install the most mature Yosemite.