This picture was taken with a 35 mm camera and then scanned into the computer. The original picture was very dark even after increasing light and contrast.
One of the things to remember when layering pictures, it is much easier on your computer, software and mental well-being to work with just 2 images at a time. This means taking your main picture and layering one picture on top then saving the combination image. Then open the saved image and layer another on there and so on. When I did this picture, I was using a Pentium 133 with 64 megs of RAM running Win 95. Well Adobe uses a lot of resources and when swapping (this is when contents of your RAM get copied to hard drive to make room for new data) heavily, some systems will deplete their resources. (Win 9x user and GDI heaps are limited to 64 kb, a problem that was eliminated in XP. Generally, its the lack of resources, not memory that causes crashes, lockups, and hair-pulling.) The program would slow to a crawl. Well the program spent so much time swapping information from one place to another, I think it just plain forgot where it put stuff. So I would do a pair of pictures, then close Adobe and reopen it and add one pic to the main image. This also forces you to save often, preventing a major loss of work in the event of a crash.
