Panoramic Stitching

[Eli Burakian]

I was just doing something and realized an error I might be making.  I'm just starting to do panoramics and here is my normal process:

Lightroom - Adjust white balance, and do all things to the pics and save as a preset and apply to all.
Save as PSD.

Photoshop - Use Photomerge to merge photos together.

After adjusting many parameters though, I realized if maybe I should set all sharpening and clarity to zero and vibrance unchanged.  

This is my reasoning.  Whereas traditional unsharp mask applied the same settings uniformly, don't both the sharpen and clarity in Lightroom or ACR 4.1 apply to each individual picture based on what is already in that picture?  Thus, wouldn't an identical setting appplied to multiple photos actually create different results, impeding the seamlessness of the seam?

Same thing with Vibrance I'm assuming because it's using the colors that are already present in the photo, and therefore would be different for different photos.

Lots of good answers in this forum, hopefully someone has a better understanding than I on this.

thanks,
Eli

[Kirk Gittings]

You can stitch directly from RAW files in CS3. Try that and do a comparison. I prefer it. I think it gives a more seamless stitch.

[Eli Burakian]

You can stitch directly from RAW files in CS3. Try that and do a comparison. I prefer it. I think it gives a more seamless stitch.
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Interesting, I will try that. Thanks for the tip!

That being said however, it still doesn't answer my questions about sharpening set to zero since it's based on a mask, as well as clarity and vibrance as image independent.

I also just had a weird thing happen. I merged a low res version of my pano (24 images each at 3.5 Mpix) and it looked seamless.  When I did it again (an hour long process with 24 images at 12 Mpix) it didn't line up correctly.  Does Photomerge have issues with larger files?

Eli

[marcmccalmont]

Kirk
I'm just starting to use CS3 and stitching panos in it without success. when it gets to blending the files just disappear?  Is there a set up menu for photomerge or an output file that needs to be designated?
Thanks
Marc

I did a little more debugging and it would stitch up to 4 files but died on 5 files (5D DxO converted  16 bit Tiffs) so I guess there is a size limit?