PSPP X3 hanging with one particular picture

[goyta]

A friend who doesn't know how to use graphics software and got some below-average quality pictures taken with a digital camera sent me some of them, for me to improve color, contrast, etc. A trivial job with PSPP X3, but one particular picture is making the program hang.

I open the picture, and at first nothing unusual happens. The picture was taken at 10 megapixels and is much larger than the screen, so I zoom it out with the Zoom More button for it to fit. Then I open Brightness/Contrast and correct them. Still OK. Then I open Hue/Saturation/Lightness, and that's where it starts. No matter what I do with the controls, the picture doesn't change. The "Preview on picture" checkbox is grayed out, and so is the "OK" button. I have to cancel the operation and close the H/S/L window. Afterwards, nearly ALL controls in the program become inoperant. All menus, all toolbars and buttons, everything. The only exceptions are Print, Open, Acquire, and some functions from the Palettes drop-down menu, such as Histogram. All else is completely grayed out, inaccessible, dead.

Not only that, PSPP X3 refuses to close - I can click on the "X" button, use the File menu, ALT+F4, try to close it from the Windows Taskbar, nothing works. I have to open Windows Task Manager and kill the process.

Oddly, if I invert the operation order and perform the Hue/Saturation/Lightness correction before Brightness/Contrast, it works normally and doesn't hang. Another odd thing is that the problem only seems to happen when I open the picture with the Open with Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 context menu in Windows Explorer. And even stranger, it doesn't always happen if I rename the picture or copy it to another folder, then edit it (but the program refusing to close still happens). I'm puzzled, I've never seen anything like this!

My PSPP X3 install already has the 13.01 patch and the rest of my configuration will be shown with the post, I guess. Since this forum doesn't allow attachments, I have uploaded the mysterious picture to Rapidshare, and it can be downloaded and examined from http://rapidshare.com/files/374777094/2477.jpg (3.7 MB) - my friend said she didn't mind me posting it here.

Thank you very much.

[marty2010]

After Win7 loads, how much of the 2GB memory do you have left?
After Corel and the jpg loads?
How much video memory do you have?

[goyta]

Vaughan, I rebooted Windows 7, logged in (I normally use a non-administrative account for security), let my usual resident programs (e.g. antivirus) load, waited two minutes for everything else to load and settle, and Task Manager showed the following data (for an obvious total 2048 MB RAM):

Cached: 700 MB
Available: 1452 MB
Free: 839 MB

---

Then I loaded PSPP X3 (just the program, no pictures). After the main window (Full Editor) was displayed, for about one minute, cached memory kept rising steadily and free memory falling, with available memory more or less constant, until values stabilized around the following:

Cached: 1155 MB
Available: 1324 MB
Free: 230 MB

---

Next, I opened the mysterious picture. Not much changed:

Cached: 1165 MB
Available: 1298 MB
Free: 197 MB

---

My video card has 256 MB memory. It is fully off-board (PCI Express) and uses nothing of the main RAM.

Thanks!

[sjj1805]

The fact that this happens with this ONE picture tends to suggest it is THAT picture that is at fault and is possibly corrupted.
You can try saving the unedited picture - perhaps in a different format e.g. bmp, TIFF or PSPimage.
CLOSE Paint Shop Pro.
Open it again and load the new image.

[Tim Morrison]

I have uploaded the mysterious picture to Rapidshare, and it can be downloaded and examined from http://rapidshare.com/files/374777094/2477.jpg (3.7 MB)

Unfortunately the Rapidshare link allows you to view the file, but not to download the file, and to tell anything useful about it, I'd need an exact copy of the file.
Could you email me a copy to
hangingjpg.c.psptim@xoxy.net

[goyta]

The fact that this happens with this ONE picture tends to suggest it is THAT picture that is at fault and is possibly corrupted.
You can try saving the unedited picture - perhaps in a different format e.g. bmp, TIFF or PSPimage.
CLOSE Paint Shop Pro.
Open it again and load the new image.

Yes, I know I could do that, Steve. And I also have other graphics software where I can process the picture as well, although PSPP X3 is by far the handiest and most convenient of all. (In fact, I have already done just that, but preserved the original picture for investigation. No errors with other software.)

But I didn't start this thread because I wanted to edit the picture and couldn't do it. That's not the point. The problem is, if the picture file is really corrupted, then PSPP X3 should detect it and display an error message saying so. If instead it's behaving strangely and hanging, then it has a bug - it should not be doing that, especially if the picture is not found to be corrupted by any possible definition or measure, though it certainly contains some byte sequence or whatever that triggers this odd behaviour. And bugs should be reported and investigated, so that they can be corrected.

Not only that, if this problem isn't explained and corrected, I can't be sure myself that the program is not going to hang again and be useless to edit some other picture that I may encounter in the future. In other words, I'd like to have an idea of how far I can trust PSPP X3 in the future. It was for these two reasons that I posted this problem report.

[goyta]

Unfortunately the Rapidshare link allows you to view the file, but not to download the file, and to tell anything useful about it, I'd need an exact copy of the file.
Could you email me a copy

My fault. I should have predicted that most browsers are configured to handle the JPEG MIME type for display instead of saving. If there were an ordinary download link, one could perhaps use "Save link as" or something like that, but Rapidshare and other file sharing sites do that by other means.

I have sent you the file by e-mail. Thank you very much for your help.

[goyta]

Tim, sorry, but my e-mail to you bounced back. Your e-mail server refused the message, with the following error: 552 Message size exceeds maximum permitted (state 18). Indeed, with Base64 encoding for e-mail, the picture grew to over 5 MB.

I have made a new upload with the picture in a .ZIP file. Of course, JPEG images have negligible compression in .ZIP archives, if at all, but I did that just to fool your browser and make it save the file instead of displaying the picture. It can now be downloaded from http://rapidshare.com/files/375340675/2477.zip (still 3.7 MB). This will also make the picture available to other people who might want to examine it. The old upload was now deleted.

[marty2010]

I could not download (ZIP) as a free user, after waiting several minutes.
Maybe because I looked at your original jpg yesterday?

[Trev Bowden]

Well It opened for me and I copy pasted into X3 and played with it to my hearts content and nothing i did gave X3 any problems. I can only think it may be a Preview problem that some folk had. Download the X3 update and see if that fixes it

[goyta]

Vaughan, Rapidshare only blocks new downloads for free users for at most an hour, and it would tell you so if that were the case. I don't know why you couldn't download it. Maybe some security software in your PC or network blocking their JavaScripts or whatever they use?

Trev, my PSPP X3 install already has the 13.01 patch.

[sjj1805]

A good place to upload stuff to share with others is Microsoft Sky Drive
25 GB of storage space
Files up to 50MB in size - anything larger just split them with either Winzip or WinRAR.
Unlike other free web space storage sites, this one is from Microsoft and so I don't expect my files to suddenly vanish overnight!