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Author Topic: LR/ACR Stitching Summary  (Read 824 times)

Chris Kern

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LR/ACR Stitching Summary
« on: February 27, 2020, 07:54:44 pm »

I discovered a link to this essay by Adobe developer Josh Bury on Julieanne Kost's weblog.  I'm just a casual creator of panoramas (recent sample here), and since it was introduced, I've been a fan of Adobe's approach because it emits a "half-backed" linear DNG which can for most purposes be subjected to further post-processing as though it were a raw file.  I can't say I learned much new from the Bury article, but it served as an excellent summary of the features of the LR/ACR "pano merge" facility.  Which still rather amazes me.  Of course, I know the Adobe applications need to demosaic the original files in order to stitch them together, but if you don't think about that you can mostly treat the composite as though it was a real out-of-camera RGB raw.

john beardsworth

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Re: LR/ACR Stitching Summary
« Reply #1 on: February 28, 2020, 05:13:40 am »

The one thing I wish he had mentioned was which adjustments to original frames are "baked into" the merged file. I think it's just dust spot corrections, so it makes sense to correct spots repeating in the same position before you merge - correct on one frame, sync to the rest, then merge - rather than having to correct the spot each time it occurs in the merged file.

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Paul2660

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Re: LR/ACR Stitching Summary
« Reply #2 on: February 28, 2020, 09:25:48 am »

The only adjustments I know of are dust as anything else is dropped off during the merging. 

I still say the process has an issue of blown highlights, it always seems to push the exposure .5 to 1 full stop and blows out highlights.  More of an issue during use of tiffs.  If you just merge the raws within LR and create the pano DNG the process seems to less tendency to blow out the sky.

Still prefer the process for the boundary warp.  For my use, it's a great asset as LR can do this without softening the image where the warp is applied, where as in CC if you manually warp the process can quickly lead to edge softness.

Paul C
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mtakeda

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Re: LR/ACR Stitching Summary
« Reply #3 on: February 28, 2020, 06:39:21 pm »

Hi, Paul,

When I merge raw to creat the pano image it is dng or something else? Please tell me how to make the dng file. Thank you.
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MattBurt

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Re: LR/ACR Stitching Summary
« Reply #4 on: February 28, 2020, 07:04:53 pm »

I like the LR method and use it a lot. It seems to do a great job for me most of the time. It outputs a dng if you input dng's. I have not tried it yet but I think you can do hdr/panos in a single step on recent LR builds. That could come in handy and help with keeping skies from blowing out too (as long as you shoot the brackets).
I make almost all my panos in Lightroom and then develop as I would a single image. Nice and easy.

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