I know this all old news to most, but if you have not tried these two features, in LR or ACR, (I will always prefer LR) it's well worth the time spent.
Briefly, I spent years working with various Canon cameras since early 2003, and with most of them I usually shot a HDR series mainly an exposure bracket, as I felt the extreme noise in shadows could defeat a single frame. Over the years I have tried everything out there for HDR. I am not looking for the X-Ray 3D look, just a good blend. Sure it could be done manually, but the software tools out that combine the files did seem to make it a bit easier. As the HDR software improved most allowed you to use them as plug-ins to LR but as far as I know the resulting image was a tif, no longer a raw. I found issues with most of the tools, either with alignment, or ghosting or both, or as with Nik issues around spectral highlights that pretty much ruined a file.
Now to the present. I was working on a shot from my Canon 5D MKII, 2 pano's each taken in a 3 shot bracket. I underexposed due to the fact I was shooting into the sun. My original file, which looked fine in web sizes or small print, just did not have what I wanted for a 24 x 72 print at 360dpi.
So I went back to the raw files (ever wonder why you should shoot raw?), re-imported the 6 files and in less than 30 minutes, I had a image ready to export. It will need some tweaking warping in CC, but darn, it was just great.
LR easily works out the HDR series for both of the bracketed series and saves them as DNGs, Then you just have to take those two DNGs and run the pano selection and you have a shot. Now you can still work the image in LR with all the tool available as it's still a DNG raw, then export. The image lines up very well, no issues for me. This is the workflow I have wanted for years and I wanted to say, thanks to Adobe for working this out in LR. In fact the alignment so far of all the images I have worked up is very accurate.
The only issues I have found.
LR6 is considerably slower for me with the GPU acceleration on, not sure if that will get better.
The HDR combination on maximum de-ghost pulled in an excessive amount of noise from the darkest of the series (BTW not this series but another one I worked up).
In the screen shot below, from left to right, you can see the 6 raw files, the 2 HDR combinations from the 3 bracket segments, then the panorama, which is still be worked.
Just wanted pass this on as this whole workflow is an amazing step forward to me.
