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vectorizor · Guest

Hello all,

I am writing a Photoshop plug-in on Windows, and I am having trouble
with allocating memory. Essentially, the code performs a very complex
operation on the image, so 9 buffer planes are required as scratch
memory. The problem occurs when the image that a user tries to process
is big, say 10 mega pixels or more. A Photoshop error pops up saying
"Could not complete the command because of a program error".

The error occurs in Photoshop's memory allocation routine,
'FilterRecord->bufferProcs->allocateProc'. It simply fails, hence the
problem must be allocating the memory. So I tried to replace this with
a call to a good old malloc, but trying to allocate the 9 planes
fails, because malloc returns a NULL pointer.

Now the weird thing is that processing a single 10MB will fail,
whereas I can process seven or eight 8MB images without a complaint
from Photoshop. Furthermore, with those seven or eight 8MB still open
in Photoshop, I can process a 20MB image with a command-line
equivalent of the plug-in. So in a nutshell, there is enough memory
as I can allocated twice more memory than what fails in Photoshop, so
what is going on? I could maybe understand that the Photoshop function
refuses to allocate such memory for some reasons, but why does the
malloc in the plug-in fail?! Especially since the malloc in the
command-line equivalent succeeds without a problem for an image TWICE
bigger?!

I would greatly appreciate any comments/ideas/suggestions.

Thanks in advance

Alex