Troubleshooting GRIP

Here are some of the most likely problems you might encounter when using GRIP. Please let me know if you find others.

Problem	Cause / likely solution
GRIP will not start. I get a message like Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Bad version number in .class file	Upgrade your Java Run-time Environment (JRE) to version 6 or later. See either java.com or Sun's Java developer's web site.
GRIP is very slow. Eg, it takes very much longer than 5 seconds to load an image file.	Check how much RAM your machine has. GRIP's run.bat file contains the text "-Xms768m -Xmx1024m". This means that the JVM will start with 768Mbytes of memory and may if necessary expand that to 1024Mbytes (ie, 1Gbyte). If your physical RAM is smaller than either of those figures the JVM's memory will be partly mapped to disc. In that case GRIP will cause a lot of swapping of data between RAM and disc. You will therefore need to edit run.bat so that the memory sizes are smaller, to fit within physical RAM.
GRIP will not open my RAW image file	GRIP uses a third party JAR file, called jrawio, for opening RAW image files. Camera manufacturers are continually enhancing their RAW file formats so it is hard for the maintainers of jrawio to keep up to date. Check at Tidal Wave to see whether there is a newer version. Alternatively there may now be other suppliers of Java code for reading RAW images. The important thing is that they must be compatible with the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) standard for plug-in readers/writers. They almost certainly will be. To use any new image reader JAR file, edit the single line in GRIP's run.bat file so that the semicolon-separated list of JAR files following -cp contains the new one. Work-around: first convert your images to 16-bit TIFF format, either using your camera manufacturer's supplied software or by using Adobe Photoshop or other RAW processing software. Be careful though that the conversion software does not automatically modify the data (eg, to apply "picture styles").
The help options do not work	Ensure you have unzipped the help files to the correct folder relative to where GRIP is installed. This diagram shows how the GRIP directory should look for running the application.