Merge to HDR Pro Cs5, results in completely black image.

Question

Whenever i merge from wither Lightroom or even within CS5 itself, the resulting image is more often than not a 32 bit image which displays as a pure black image. This happens even when i choose 8 bit or 16 bit from within the HDR dialogue box.
I can choose to remove the 32 bit preview options from the edit menu, and the image will emerge but with no HDR toning. If i try to convert from 32 bit to 8 or 16, i get teh HDR Toning dialogue box but then immediately get the 'not enough RAM' error message.
any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I can't really help, but I can tell you that I am having similar weird behavior using HDR Pro. I posted several messages here, but with no replies. What happens to me is varied. Sometimes CS5 aligns the images being merged, and sometimes not (using the same images). I also have the same issue of getting a completely black screen when trying to convert to 16 bit. The workaround for me is to close and reopen PS. If I do this the conversion will generally work, but only once. So when doing HDR I have to close and open PS between each HDR session.
What I notice in both these cases is that there seem to be two steps in the process. In the original merge there is process of making layers and processing each of the images to be merged individually. After that the alignment process begins, with marquees, transforms, crops, etc. In the 16 bit conversion there if first the process of getting to 32-bit options, and then there is a progress bar, which has to complete before the final conversion to a lower bit depth.
My supposition (and mere supposition it is) is that there is some kind of memory issue here, but that it is not well handled by the program. In CS4 when merging more than three frames, I often encountered out-of-memory errors, which could usually be fixed by changing performance parameters (especially reducing the number of history states). But at least in CS4 there was a clear indication of OOM problems, and that doesn't seem to be the case here.
I am going to be trying changing various performance parameters, such as memory states, cache levels and tile sizes, and if and when I find anything out I will post results. So far the only thing I have found is that when I am having alignment problems, it is better to open HDR Pro directly in CS5, rather than from Bridge. I don't know why.
Toby