Sony A7R Mark IV Cropping Doesn't Work If Too Wide

[jkm]

I have run into an issue immediately with PM6 and cropping photos from the A7R IV.

It shows "error" in the exported file size calculation at the top left of the save diagog box, and the Save button is grayed out when trying to save a cropped version of a JPEG image if the cropped area is wider than a certain amount.

It doesn't seem to matter how much area is included, only if it is wider than a certain amount.

If I narrow the cropped area down below a certain width, then the error in the file size calculation goes away, and the Save button is not grayed out anymore. But if I keep it too wide and try to reduce the height of the cropped area, it doesn't seem to matter and the error still happens.

Apparently some sort of hard limit on the cropped size is stopping me from saving cropped images.

Thanks for your help.

[Kirk Baker]

Can you provide a sample image that reproduces the problem?

Thanks,

-Kirk

[jkm]

Yes, any photo will work.

[jkm]

FYI:

Up to this moment every single crop I ever tried to do beyond about 80% of the image width (which for a rotated image means height of course if the camera was in vertical orientation) would fail.

The bug has been always present since the first few photos done at the beginning of October, and I've gone through thousands of photos from several shoots.

Now I can't seem to trigger it, at least not without doing any actual cropping work. Just selecting a cropped area and bringing up the dialog box is not showing any error.

But I have restarted my computer for the first time since then. This *could* have reset something that is causing the bug not to show up yet.

And also, thinking back, I believe that the very first one or two wide crops that I did worked, before the bug permanently reared its ugly head.

What triggered the bug initially was trying to export several resolutions from the same image.

This was on many different days with PM quit in between each time. I don't think I ever restarted my computer during that time, however.

After the bug was first triggered, then PM6 would never work again for any crops beyond a certain width.

Without doing any work I can't seem to make the error flag show up.

But it will probably show up again as soon as I start doing any actual work.

If I can figure out what triggers the bug I'll let you know.

You have programmed it, though, so perhaps you already know some of the logic which would ever bring up "error" in that specific portion of the dialog box.

One of those edge cases is apparently coming up when it shouldn't be.

My personal belief is that an internal command use to estimate the file size of the scaled image is crashing due to some type of edge case behavior, and that is throwing the error.

[jkm]

Unfortunately, I cannot upload any of the images on which I actually ran into the problem. Legal reasons.

But I don't think it has anything to do with the content of the photo.

Looking back at the very first photoshoot affected, it was the fourth picture taken and the first picture that I tried to scale which caused the problem.

I exported six different crops from the photo of various portions of the image and at various resolutions. Then I ran into the bug with that image and it has been present ever since.

Today, after my computer has been restarted, the bug isn't showing up when just looking at images and pretending to crop them without actually doing it.

I'm relying on your expertise to figure this one out, because it's not reproducible except in real life.

Most likely if you duplicate the image I attached and make 10-20 copies of it, and start going through them like you were really doing work, cropping in every possible combination of coverage of the image, and every possible combination of everything else, you would run into the issue right away.

I'm using the latest version of Mojave, with the latest version of the iMac, 64 GB of RAM and the best graphics card. So it shouldn't be an issue of computing resources available.

[jkm]

Figured out steps to reproduce:

You can do this with only one image, such as the one I attached.

1. Drag cropping select region across full width of image.
2. Save/export image applying cropped area and scaling to 10% size.
3. Increase scaling from 10% and continuing saving/exporting until error message happens. (You can make it happen instantly by setting scaling to 200%.)
4. From this point on, the only way to ever export any cropped region is to make the cropped region narrower.
5. It doesn't matter at all whether the scaling size is changed back to a lower value.
6. From this point on forever, it is impossible to save/export and apply a cropped region beyond a certain width, no matter what the scaling size is.

I proved this point by quitting PM and then reopening the example image that I attached.

This was not showing any error at all due to the computer restart, but when I open it now, it shows the error only immediately as soon as I open the save dialog box. The cropped area was not changed at all from when i tried to do it in my earlier post and it wasn't showing an error.

So the real problem is that the error message status persists falsely for a certain size of cropped region no matter what.

Perhaps are you caching the calculated image size in some way?

[jkm]

Movie showing the problem, trying to get rid of it, but coming back as soon as one image is saved.

[jkm]

As you can see, the bug is inconsistent and shows up randomly at first.

On the video, it seems like saving a small region of an image at a low scaling ratio enabled a wider region of an image to be saved immediately afterwards. This is a random event and not repeatable.

The consistent behavior after the bug "stabilized" was that no matter what I did (including lots of trial and error), no image could ever be exported no matter what unless the cropped region was less than about 75-80% of the total image width.

There could be more than one bug happening here. I do recall having some weird issues with cropping before.

I do think it has to do with caching of the error of some sort, because otherwise as soon as the settings were changed out of the parameters that triggered the error, then the error should go away.

But nothing changes anything once the error happens.

[jkm]

This is urgent.

Please fix.

Thank you so much.

[Kirk Baker]

We had a image dimension limit of 8000 pixels on a side in PM due to its 32-bit nature.  I've upped it to 65000 for PM6.  It fixes your problem completely, though if you were to scale full width crops from your camera up by around 700% it will still fail.

-Kirk

[jkm]

Wow, thank you so much!!

This is wonderful!!