Initial impressions of pano in Lr 6

[Stephen G]

I use Photomerge in PS CC a lot to merge multi-row panos of artworks that I reproduce. Photomerge generally gets it done fast and without any trouble. I gave such a merge to the new Pano Merge in LR6 and it rejected the files, reporting that they didn't match. I think it needs the source files to have the same pixel dimensions, which is kinda understandable, but it's NOT a requirement for Photomerge in PS.

I DO crop the files that I feed to Photomerge because there is always a background behind the artworks that does not change from shot to shot. If I leave the background in then Photomerge has trouble lining the images up.

So, for now, the LR Pano Merge is not useful for my repro panos.

[Ann JS]

I need to test this a bit more, but I do get very different results from using "PS Merge to HDR/Tone in 32-bits ACR" than I get when using the same files to Merge to HDR in either Lr or ACR.

The former method opens the merged file in 32-bits in ACR, and remains as such in Ps until you mode-change manually to 16 bits. So far I have found that I get smoother tone-transitions with this method although it is much slower than using the direct Lr or ACR route.

The Lr and ACR method is much faster (ACR is even faster than Lr) but I have been getting extenuated edge-effects in textured areas (such as an interior stone wall) which I find to be a bit too HDR-Grungey.

[dreed]

I need to test this a bit more, but I do get very different results from using "PS Merge to HDR/Tone in 32-bits ACR" than I get when using the same files to Merge to HDR in either Lr or ACR.

What about panoramas?

With export to TIFF, merge in panorama and back into LR, I get similar results in terms of detail with Lr but the colours are quite different and arguably not as good.

[Ann JS]

I actually use Bridge-hosted ACR for Panos and HDR (because it is so much faster) but it shouldn't make much difference to the results.

More experimenting showed that, when using ACR/Lr HDR, setting de-ghosting to "None" reduces traditional HDR-Grunging considerably.

[David Eichler]

I have a pano (2 rows of 7 portrait images from D800) that I have run through almost every pano application known to man.



Lightroom is the first pano program I have used that successfully integrated the area shown in the red square.  For some reason other applications cannot line up the curb and concrete in this area.  

I am running a Win 7 64 i7 with 8 cores and 16GB RAM.  It took 12 minutes to create the pano, which is 22549 x 10155 pixels and the dng file is 1GB in size.  While it is running everything else slows right down as Lr utilizes most of the resources. I'm not sure why the dng file is so large as the 14 NEF files used to generate the pano add up to 645 MB and there is a lot of overlap.  It also took a very long time, around a minute of "loading" when I zoomed to 100%.  Not very good performance.



So it is not quick, but for my test case, it is the best pano composite I have seen and you are still working with raw data afterwards.

I had set the pano generation to automatically crop.  I then ran auto upright, which worked, but removed the crop.  I don't think it should have done that.  Edit: I had constrain crop turned off in the basic tab of Lens corrections.

However, kudos to the Lr engineers for the quality of the composite.

I haven't done anything more than two-image stitches with this so far. Mostly, it works fine for that and seems faster than doing it in PS. Nice that it creates a dng file of the merge, which retains all of the original RAW adjustments. One glitch I have found so far with one set of photos. LR wouldn't merge these because it said there wasn't enough info to do that, even though there was a substantial amount of overlap between to two images and PS merged them just fine.

[Wayne Fox]

What about panoramas?

With export to TIFF, merge in panorama and back into LR, I get similar results in terms of detail with Lr but the colours are quite different and arguably not as good.

I did my normal procedure of processing one image, syncing that to the others, then exported to PS and merged (basically same things as making tiffs). I  then merged the raw files with no processing inside of LR, and sync’ed the resulting merge from one of the files I had used to make the tiff.

Colors and tones were identical.

I also just used Adobes Flat Field plugin to fix Lens Cast issues from using a tech camera to make the dng’s, merged those and then did all processing after the merge, with great  results.  I liked that I was doing the processing viewing the final document and not on just one slice of it.

My normal process is to do processing in Capture One, generate tiffs then merge then use ACR or LR for tweaking of the merged file, and I do think that will still give me the best end result.  I’m not clear how “raw” a linear DNG file is and if converting the phase .IIQ files to linear .dng costs anything.  For some images it might, others maybe not so much.  I do know that C1 is much better at cleaning up single pixel noise in shadows that have to be pulled up than LR for my Phase files.