With the advent of ACR9/Lr6, I'm left pondering what is the best way to keep panoramas.
With PtGui I can keep a project file and generate a TIFF or JPEG whenever I want. Or render to TIFF and just keep that and throw away the raw images.
Hi,
I never throw away Raws. Conversion quality keeps improving, so it can be worthwhile to revisit an earlier conversion that was used as a tile in a panorama. It also allows to use different conversion settings per tile, e.g. a warmer colorbalance for shadow tiles and a normal or tint adjusted version for the medium tones to highlights. With plenty of overlap, and a good blending engine (like Smartblend as a plugin in PTGUI), the transition between tiles becomes invisible, but it is there. The resampling quality can be adjusted much better to the subject matter in PTGUI due to the wide choice of resampling algorithms. PTGUI also offers many more projection methods for difficult subjects, or extreme angles of view.
With ACR9/Lr6, when it works, I can generate a DNG file from which I can later develop into TIFF, JPEG or whatever.
When it works(!), it is nice to have a single panofile in semi-raw format. But you are pretty much locked-in into the Adobe universe with such a DNG. There are also too many shortcomings in the Adobe implementation, and there is a file size limitation. Definitely not ready for prime time, and it remains to be seen if they can come close to what solid performers like PTGUI have to offer. Software that is specialized in a particular task is likely to do better than a jack of all trades.
Cheers,
Bart
