Lightroom Pano Merge

[Chris Kern]

I've mostly avoided panoramas except for a few simple experiments because I assumed that to get good results I would need (1) a tripod with a specialized pano head and (2) dedicated software.  But my wife and I were in Vancouver last week and I figured I had nothing to lose by trying to see what I could do shooting handheld and using Lightroom to combine the images.

I was pleasantly surprised by how well they turned out.

It appears LR's stitching algorithm can accommodate a lot of overlap.  The attached cityscape was a composite of 21 (sic) images, although I've cropped a bit from both sides in this JPEG.  I wasn't counting as I panned the camera: the "Lookout Tower" in the Harbour Centre building where I was shooting was filled with other tourists and I was too busy dodging them and making certain I kept the horizon roughly in the same part of the frame to keep track of how many times I snapped the shutter.  When I got back to our hotel room and realized how many shots I had made, I thought I might have to cull some of the redundant ones before making the stitch, but LR managed the excessive overlap with no difficulty.  The skyline in the second attachment, which I made the following day on the other side of the harbor (from Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver, for those familiar with the city), is a composite of eight images.  I was less distracted when I shot this series and each of the individual images only overlaps by about a third with its successor.

Both panos were shot handheld with a Fuji X-T1 and a kit 18-55mm lens.  All the work in post was done on the LR-generated composites except for a little content-aware fill in Photoshop, so getting the final images to look the way I wanted involved no more effort than it would if the source had been a single raw image.

[Schewe]

Nice shots....and yes, Pano Merge works really well.

[davemiller]

I'm impressed, my own efforts were much less successful so perhaps the secret is to take plenty of shots rather than just the three I used. I shall try again.

[Stephane Desnault]

I'm an experienced "panoramist", having shot and sold many full 360*180 panos, using the required pano head and sophisticated software in the past ten years.

That said, I just LOVE the impromptu panos I can do with Lightroom. A few quick points:

1/ Overlap is GOOD - and even needed so that the software understands and corrects for distorsion. From one image to the next, I typically aim for a 30% overlap (rule of thumb: the significant landmark on the right edge of picture n should move to the left edge of picture n+1, assuming you're panning left to right). You're not making thing difficult for LR if you have overlap, quite the opposite.

2/ Shoot in portrait mode for more coverage.

3/ For landscapes with no very close object, you definitely DON'T need a pano head, as any parallax error will be negligible. Indoors is definitely another story, and a full 360*180 will almost always require a pano head.

Best,

Stephane

[MBehrens]

Love the Pano tool in LR CC/6 too. Much better than the X-T1 in camera panos.
The resulting DNG files can be quite large, 21 16Mpx will get big. I've found that converting them to lossy DNG will reduce their size substantially. Unless you are printing wall murals with the files, you probably won't see the artifacts, I don't.

[Paul2660]

Both are very good CC's ability to use content aware to close up white space after the warp during the conversion is a neat addition LR can not do currently.  I have also found the LR seems to work best in raw files not imported tifs.

Paul

[dpirazzi]

I too love the convenience of doing panos in Lightroom, when it works. I've probably done 25 or 30 panos since upgrading to LR6, mostly on tripod, and Lightroom has worked on all but 4. On those 4, Panorama Factory successfully stitched the exported TIFFs without issue.

Dave

[mdijb]

I have done a bunch of panos in LR and the smae images in CC.  The end product from each is not the same.  The LR merges seem to be a bit elongated and distorted, while the CC process gave me so such distortions.  In addition, the Auto edge fill in THe CC process is very nice.  It does add another step if using CC but I like the results better and will stick with this method.

MDIJB

[Chris Kern]

I have also found the LR seems to work best in raw files not imported tifs.

I haven't performed any tests of creating panoramas from raw vs. cooked files, but Lightroom's ability to work with the former is a big win, as far as I'm concerned.  Among other things, LR emits what I presume is a linear DNG: a demosaiced file, which I believe Eric Chan refers to as a "scene-referred" as opposed to "output-referred" format, that still permits non-destructive color adjustments.  It's like working with a single raw capture file.

[Paul2660]

I haven't performed any tests of creating panoramas from raw vs. cooked files, but Lightroom's ability to work with the former is a big win, as far as I'm concerned.  Among other things, LR emits what I presume is a linear DNG: a demosaiced file, which I believe Eric Chan refers to as a "scene-referred" as opposed to "output-referred" format, that still permits non-destructive color adjustments.  It's like working with a single raw capture file.

I agree  a huge benefit.

Paul

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

I agree  a huge benefit.

Hi Paul,

I wouldn't call it a benefit, but rather a huge convenience.

Fact is, that a properly executed stitch with e.g. PTGUI, will potentially deliver a higher image quality. That's a benefit in my book, but it's less convenient to get there from a workflow perspective. The hugely larger level of control of a dedicated stitching program, and the better resampling quality, can deliver much higher image quality and make some types of stitches possible that will fail in LR.

What certainly is a benefit of the LR capability to stitch Raw files is that, with a lower threshold and added convenience, people will start using stitching more often than they did because they thought it was difficult and is impossible without purchasing expensive accessories.

Cheers,
Bart

[rob211]

I'm curious. Has anyone tried Lr's panorama as a quick and dirty focus stacking technique? I tried it and didn't get acceptable results, even though stacking with the same photos worked in Ps. I know that in Ps you have to select between a stack and a pano when blending, so I guess that's the difference.

But maybe if there was less overlap? or some other way of composing before using pano?

It would be great if in addition to the HDR and pano we had stacking.

[Schewe]

I'm curious. Has anyone tried Lr's panorama as a quick and dirty focus stacking technique?

Nope...won't work but focus stacking is on Adobe's agenda for ACR & LR.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... a properly executed stitch with e.g. PTGUI, will potentially deliver a higher image quality...

+1

[rdonson]

Nope...won't work but focus stacking is on Adobe's agenda for ACR & LR.

+25 

[mcbroomf]

Glad to hear that Adobe are working on focus stacking in LR.

I like the 2 photos but there's a (to me) whopping discontinuity in the 1st.  The yellow rail along the bottom over to the right.  I'm not sure but further right also looks suspicious. 

I use Auto Pano and one of the things I like about it is that it does allow an interaction after putting together the image, and shows you a fit value, which if poor you can then troubleshoot (and potentially fix) with control points between the offending files.  I'm pretty sure PTGUI offers a similar interaction.  Having said that I've use LR pano, especially to generate some quick small jpegs and it does reasonable well.

[Chris Kern]

I like the 2 photos but there's a (to me) whopping discontinuity in the 1st.  The yellow rail along the bottom over to the right.  I'm not sure but further right also looks suspicious.

That railing, and the railroad tracks below it, inauthentically appear to be bowed toward the camera—the result of my using LR's cylindrical projection to stitch the composite image.  (The spherical projection exhibited similar distortion and the perspective projection was not available, probably because the arc was too wide: it covers the better part of 180 degrees, as best I can determine from a Google Maps satellite view.)  I don't know whether another application could have maintained the straight appearance of those features near the center without significantly distorting those on the left and right sides; I don't have any experience with dedicated panorama-generation apps.  I suspect, based on some experiments a while ago, that Photoshop would have produced a similar result.  I presume there are some inherent limits to how much geometrical magic you can perform when you map a cylinder onto a plane.

[Paul2660]

Chris,

Were the singles taken vertically or horizontally?   

Having used Ptgui and Autopano for years now, I personally don't agree that they can make a better image.  Where both Autopano and Ptgui break down IMO is in the exposure blending.  Often times both tools can't get a sky even especially a sky where the light is fading across the frame. 

There is more user interaction available with both Ptgui and Autopano, but I have never really been able to do much with it.  Autopano has some good video's but even then when you start really getting into the techno parts of the shot it can be very difficult at least to me, more time than it's worth, and then after all is said and done you don't get a good blend.  And with Ptgui, that's using the enblend plugin.  On the flip side, with CC panoramas, at least with Fuji X-trans tifs, the final output to me was always softened unlike Ptgui and Autopano.  I had switched over to those tools for Fuji files due to the softness problems with CC.  Now that it can all be done as a dng inside of LR, that issue is gone.

To me it's a balance of time needed and what's the net output going to be worth, as more and more folks are willing to accept a pano from the iPhone as top end. 

What LR has to me is a better overall solution, sure it could use some fine tuning, and maybe that will come later.   But the ability to have the image as a dng and then work it with the LR toolset is worth a lot. 

The rail bending in the foreground is possibly also due to the lens, I would need to see the original images.  But there has to be some curve there or maybe it's a 90 degree bend?  The railroad track also pick it up to a degree.  Some of this can be fixed by warping the final image in CC or using the Len correction tool on the final shot. 

I don't think that a nodal solution would have fixed the curving of the rail. The only solution I can think of would be a shift lens setup. 

LR and CC both to offer a better exposure blending in most cases than either Autopano or Ptgui, where the later are going to give you more options to fine tune the distortions. 

I have been a stitcher since 2002 or so always to gain more overall resolution, not as much for the pano look.  But the tools that are available now are excellent.

Paul

[Chris Kern]

I like the 2 photos but there's a (to me) whopping discontinuity in the 1st.  The yellow rail along the bottom over to the right.  I'm not sure but further right also looks suspicious.  

That railing, and the railroad tracks below it, inauthentically appear to be bowed toward the camera—the result of my using LR's cylindrical projection to stitch the composite image.  (The spherical projection exhibited similar distortion and the perspective projection was not available, probably because the arc was too wide: it covers the better part of 180 degrees, as best I can determine from a Google Maps satellite view.)  I don't know whether another application could have maintained the straight appearance of those features near the center without significantly distorting those on the left and right sides; I don't have any experience with dedicated panorama-generation apps.  I suspect, based on some experiments a while ago, that Photoshop would have produced a similar result.  I presume there are some inherent limits to how much geometrical magic you can perform when you map a cylinder onto a plane.

Sorry, I misunderstood your post the first time.  You're quite correct: the roof edge with the railing in the center foreground is not cleanly stitched.  I don't know whether that is the result of my sloppy handheld technique (I was maneuvering around a stream of other tourists as I made the individual shots) or some failing of Lightroom.

[Chris Kern]

Were the singles taken vertically or horizontally?

Vertically.  

To me it's a balance of time needed and what's the net output going to be worth, as more and more folks are willing to accept a pano from the iPhone as top end.

What LR has to me is a better overall solution, sure it could use some fine tuning, and maybe that will come later.   But the ability to have the image as a dng and then work it with the LR toolset is worth a lot.

It certainly is to me.  And I evaluate the cost-benefit ratio the way you do—although I also appreciate the desire of the pano perfectionists to achieve an optimal result.

I should reiterate that I shot far more individual frames than were necessary—or probably desirable—when I made that first image.  I was navigating along the perimeter of the observation tower around many other tourists, who probably thought the guy snapping picture after picture with his camera in portrait mode was a little loopy, and I was paying as much attention to avoiding collisions as I was to the viewfinder.  (Maybe if I had acted a little loopier, they would have given me a wide berth and made my job easier. . . . )  When I got back to the hotel and realized there were 21 shots in that sequence, my first thought was that I needed to cull out the more egregiously redundant ones or Lightroom was going to experience massive indigestion trying to combine them.  But I decided to try using them all, just to find out what would happen.  And what happened is what you see in the attachment to my original post.