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Author Topic: Found A Lightroom Limitation  (Read 6294 times)

Mort54

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Found A Lightroom Limitation
« on: November 23, 2007, 03:46:10 pm »

I was printing a few Hubble space telescope images to hang on my office wall and discovered that Lightroom 1.3 will not import an 18,000 x 18,000 pixel image (that's 324 Mpix, for those of you who are a little math challenged). WHAT IS ADOBE THINKING!!!! :-)

Just kidding about the last line. I really did try to import an 18k x 18k pixel image though, and it really didn't work, but I think handling images that large would be above and beyond the call of duty. The image does open fine in CS3 however, and on my Mac Pro with 4 gig of RAM, it didn't really seem to slow things down very much. Pretty impressive, actually.
« Last Edit: November 23, 2007, 04:15:43 pm by Mort54 »
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sniper

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« Reply #1 on: November 23, 2007, 04:14:29 pm »

Damm! and I just ordered a Hubble from Amazon. Now what am I supposed to use for a web gallery?   Wayne
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Gabe

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« Reply #2 on: November 23, 2007, 04:31:42 pm »

Quote
I was printing a few Hubble space telescope images to hang on my office wall and discovered that Lightroom 1.3 will not import an 18,000 x 18,000 pixel image (that's 324 Mpix, for those of you who are a little math challenged). WHAT IS ADOBE THINKING!!!! :-)

Just kidding about the last line. I really did try to import an 18k x 18k pixel image though, and it really didn't work, but I think handling images that large would be above and beyond the call of duty. The image does open fine in CS3 however, and on my Mac Pro with 4 gig of RAM, it didn't really seem to slow things down very much. Pretty impressive, actually.
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Does anyone know what the true max. pixel limit is in the current version of Lightroom?

When the app was still in beta, I discovered that it couldn't handle any image with more than 10K pixels in a dimension (ie: it would NOT import an image with 10,001 pixels along either the vertical or horizontal dimension).

Since I have quite a few panoramic images that exceed that limit, I wrote it off as not being terribly useful to me...

Is the limit still 10,000 pixels, or have they increased it to only 17,999?  
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feppe

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Found A Lightroom Limitation
« Reply #3 on: November 23, 2007, 04:33:55 pm »

Yeah, I was also shocked (shocked!) to find out that a 550 megapixel stitch-job I'm working on wouldn't open in Lightroom. It "only" takes 15 mins to open in CS3...

In all seriousness, I doubt there's currently any need for massive images to be imported in Lightroom. LR is first and foremost a RAW image editor, and no camera produces such large images AFAIK.

Schewe

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« Reply #4 on: November 23, 2007, 04:57:12 pm »

Camera Raw and Lightroom both have a hard limit of 10K pixels in either dimension...future upgrades may eliminate that limit, but it's a hard limit at this point in time.
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sniper

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« Reply #5 on: November 24, 2007, 05:05:07 am »

Jeff just out of curiosity why is there a fixed limit rather than letting the computers ram decide?  Wayne
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Gabe

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« Reply #6 on: November 24, 2007, 12:21:14 pm »

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Camera Raw and Lightroom both have a hard limit of 10K pixels in either dimension...future upgrades may eliminate that limit, but it's a hard limit at this point in time.
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Thanks, Jeff.

To be fair, I suspect 10K is quite generous for most people's use (and it's quite a bit more than Aperture allows).

The thing I found most troublesome though was that (again - I'm speaking about the beta here) Lightroom simply ignored the images in my library that exceeded the 10K limit. They were just silently skipped during import. Given that I was working with a library of roughly 13,000 images, it took quite a while to figure out they weren't there, and then even longer to understand why.

I can easily cope with not being allowed to manipulate them using LR's tools because PS has no trouble opening images that large, but I would have liked to be able to use LR's asset-management features on them regardless.


In contrast, Aperture seems to have a limit of somewhere around 6500 pixels, but it will still import images larger than that and allow you to work with their metadata. Rather than simply ignoring them, it just gives you a blank "Unsupported Image Format" placeholder in place of a preview in the browser (thumbnails are still generated, however).
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john beardsworth

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« Reply #7 on: November 24, 2007, 12:58:17 pm »

Quote
To be fair, I suspect 10K is quite generous for most people's use (and it's quite a bit more than Aperture allows).....
In contrast, Aperture seems to have a limit of somewhere around 6500 pixels, but it will still import images larger than that and allow you to work with their metadata. Rather than simply ignoring them, it just gives you a blank "Unsupported Image Format" placeholder in place of a preview in the browser (thumbnails are still generated, however).
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That's incorrect. I don't know Aperture's limit, if any, but your images are not importing for another reason. I just tested and was able to import a 13000 x 3600 panorama into Aperture. That said, it's clearly desirable that Lightroom follows the placeholder model you describe (at the very least).  Otherwise, its ability to manage all your work is somewhat limited.

John
« Last Edit: November 24, 2007, 12:59:23 pm by johnbeardy »
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Gabe

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« Reply #8 on: November 24, 2007, 01:31:37 pm »

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That's incorrect. I don't know Aperture's limit, if any, but your images are not importing for another reason. I just tested and was able to import a 13000 x 3600 panorama into Aperture. That said, it's clearly desirable that Lightroom follows the placeholder model you describe (at the very least).  Otherwise, its ability to manage all your work is somewhat limited.

John
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Well that's good to know, John.. although annoying that I now have to figure out what's going on.  

The last time I spent any time looking at this in Aperture was quite some time ago, and with perfectly square test-images I had created in PS.. IIRC, a 6500x6500px 16-bit RGB TIFF was the largest I was able to import without getting the "Unsupported" message.. that's still smaller than the image you mention though (which is about the same size as many of my pans), so I'll certainly have to revisit those images in my library.

In the end, the fact that they were at least included in the catalogue and I was still able to work with their metadata was enough that I just learned to live with it..
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barryfitzgerald

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« Reply #9 on: November 24, 2007, 03:18:38 pm »

Adobe need to increase the size limit by some margin.

It is important for 2 reasons. Panoramics, and film scans.

Both of which can exceed the 10,000 with some ease...get to it adobe ;-)
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marty m

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« Reply #10 on: November 25, 2007, 03:24:26 am »

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Thanks, Jeff.

The thing I found most troublesome though was that (again - I'm speaking about the beta here) Lightroom simply ignored the images in my library that exceeded the 10K limit. They were just silently skipped during import. Given that I was working with a library of roughly 13,000 images, it took quite a while to figure out they weren't there, and then even longer to understand why.

I can easily cope with not being allowed to manipulate them using LR's tools because PS has no trouble opening images that large, but I would have liked to be able to use LR's asset-management features on them regardless.
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I entirely agree and made the same point on other threads.  This  defeats the purpose of using Lightroom as a library and catalogue. As you discovered the hard way.

Lightroom should be able to import files that have already been created in a program like Stitcher, that would be a completed and flattened tiff, show it as a thumbnail, and print it.

I don't agree with the comments that this is a rare issue that only concerns a few photographers.  I was not able to import panos that consisted of three images stitched together that were taken by the original 1Ds.  

Panos are one of the growth areas for advanced amateur photography.  Any program that claims to maintain a master library must have the ability to import those files at a minimum.
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sojournerphoto

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« Reply #11 on: November 27, 2007, 12:19:06 pm »

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I entirely agree and made the same point on other threads.  This  defeats the purpose of using Lightroom as a library and catalogue. As you discovered the hard way.

Lightroom should be able to import files that have already been created in a program like Stitcher, that would be a completed and flattened tiff, show it as a thumbnail, and print it.

I don't agree with the comments that this is a rare issue that only concerns a few photographers.  I was not able to import panos that consisted of three images stitched together that were taken by the original 1Ds. 

Panos are one of the growth areas for advanced amateur photography.  Any program that claims to maintain a master library must have the ability to import those files at a minimum.
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I completely agree. I love LR as a DAM and like it as a raw workflow program, but I could do with being able to access panos in my DAMM, rather than having to import a small jpg version to remind me of where they are!!
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Mike Louw

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« Reply #12 on: November 27, 2007, 06:08:27 pm »

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I was printing a few Hubble space telescope images to hang on my office wall

I'd love one of those images. Can you e-mail me one?  
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Mort54

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« Reply #13 on: November 28, 2007, 09:49:58 pm »

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I'd love one of those images. Can you e-mail me one? 
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Since I can't tell if you're serious or not, I'll just refer you to Google. Search for Hubble Space Telescope images. You'll find hundreds of them for download, in all sizes.
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