# Lightroom 6 Panoramas



## scyrene (May 7, 2015)

Hi all,
I got Lightroom 6 the other day. I've already fallen in love with the HDR and panorama features. Before that I just used the 5D3's internal HDR occasionally, and a powerful but very involved and often frustrating panorama freeware program.

Here's my first quick go - 24 shots with the 24-105 @ 24mm - and I can detect (at full size) no apparent stitching errors. Has anyone else used this yet? Any tips/problems? (Note FOV is approx 180º horizontally).


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## scyrene (May 7, 2015)

PS it saves HDRs and panoramas as a kind of raw file, so they can be edited pretty heavily afterwards too.


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## scyrene (May 7, 2015)

PPS this was shot handheld - I've learnt in the past to overlap shots. Shooting at a narrower aperture helps reduce vignetting in individual subframes too.


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## Dylan777 (May 8, 2015)

Look great scyrene

I guess I don't need 5Dsr anymore. Just bracket 5shots with my 1Dx @ 18MP


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## scyrene (May 8, 2015)

Ha! Depends. I want the 5Dr for bird shots, but for landscapes this would work fine! PS thanks. I'll do some proper ones sometime soon I hope


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## scyrene (May 8, 2015)

Just did another quick one - a little different, very low light (8 shots at 100mm, f/2.8, ISO 25600) - but it handles it very well I think. Useful as I often want quick closeups of food/flowers without distracting backgrounds, and don't want to set up something fancy.


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## Jim Saunders (May 8, 2015)

From 25 exposures (needlessly overlapped) with my 5D Mark II and LR6:

https://500px.com/photo/107431729/rockies-pan-by-jim-saunders

I'd like it if it could figure out a list for HDR pans automatically, and to mark files as rejected (or some other thing) after they've been compiled, but for now it saves using PS and exports DNGs.

Anyone else notice that the merged files don't end up in the same collection though?

Jim


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## scyrene (May 9, 2015)

Doing this one (33 shots @ 24mm) I discovered some problems. First, it refused to create a panorama with the original batch (around 40), and as Jim mentioned above, rather than telling you which shots are problematic, it just says 'choose a different selection'. Second, it requires a HUGE amount of hard drive space - this one took around 20GB while it was working (and on a 128GB SSD that's not insubstantial!). Nonetheless, it worked in the end, even if it takes a long time (5-10 mins I reckon).


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## scyrene (May 9, 2015)

More experimentation today, and a lot more learning!

Today I used my Samyang 14mm lens. First, Lr warns you if you use a lens it has no default corrections for. Second, it is more prone to failures at wider angles (I think, and this doesn't surprise me, given the greater distortion in each shot).

My first go failed - I could stitch parts, but not the whole thing (no foreground elements, ~180º horizontal FOV). Second worked (mostly fore- and midground elements, 360º FOV, see below), third mixed (lots of complex elements, some stitching errors, see below).

Lastly I did an HDR panorama. In this case I shot 7 bracketed exposures, and merged them into HDR before merging the Lr HDRs into a panorama (it is possible, yay!). Some nasty colour noise, due mostly to lens flare I think) but still - I'm not disappointed! Last pic below is 56 shots altogether. So much potential!


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## Bennymiata (May 10, 2015)

I haven't tried the panos with Lcc, but I am using the HDR feature with my real estate photography and I find it works really well.
The fact it saves the file as a DNG, allows me to do further perfecting of the file with better results than in Photoshop.


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## Mt Spokane Photography (May 10, 2015)

I've found that just doing them in photoshop is much better.

I tried both ways. Photoshop lets me clone in missing areas and remove unwanted objects rather than crop half the image away.

Lightroom:









Photoshop:


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## meywd (May 10, 2015)

The HDR merge with Lightroom is better than all other software i tried, however as far as panoramas go, Photoshop and Autostitch are better


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## scyrene (May 11, 2015)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> I've found that just doing them in photoshop is much better.
> 
> I tried both ways. Photoshop lets me clone in missing areas and remove unwanted objects rather than crop half the image away.
> 
> ...



Considering the price difference, I should hope Photoshop is better!


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## jprusa (May 11, 2015)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> I've found that just doing them in photoshop is much better.
> 
> I tried both ways. Photoshop lets me clone in missing areas and remove unwanted objects rather than crop half the image away.
> 
> ...



Elements doesn't do a bad job on Panoramas. It will ask if if you want to fill in missing content which is nice. I wish PS would do that.


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## Mt Spokane Photography (May 11, 2015)

scyrene said:


> Mt Spokane Photography said:
> 
> 
> > I've found that just doing them in photoshop is much better.
> ...


\

It costs no more, I use the Adobe cc package. $10 a month for both Lightroom and photoshop. You cannot buy photoshop any longer, except for outdated versions.


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## KeithBreazeal (May 11, 2015)

What is the limit to the number of frames LR6 will stitch?


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## rcarca (May 11, 2015)

A simple LR CC panorama:



Sunset over the Lake in St Albans by Richard Anderson, on Flickr

I am loving it (the pano feature that is!!!)!

Richard


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## scyrene (May 11, 2015)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> scyrene said:
> 
> 
> > Mt Spokane Photography said:
> ...



Ahh. I decided to get standalone Lightroom, I didn't want a subscription.


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## Lloyd (May 11, 2015)

I tried LR6 pano for the first time on some snapshots I took using my wife’s SL1 and a 10-22mm lens I brought along on a backpacking trip through the Anasazi Indian ruins in the Grand Gulch in Utah. It was hard for me to form a final judgment as these were not well thought out shots and such a wide angle lens may create its own problems when stitching. Nevertheless, LR6 seemed to work as well as the first pass through photoshop and was it easy. However, Photoshop, as a much more advanced program, gives you a lot more options to correct distortion with its transform menu of skew, distort, warp etc.


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## Jim Saunders (May 11, 2015)

KeithBreazeal said:


> What is the limit to the number of frames LR6 will stitch?



I don't know for sure but stitching 25 frames out of a 5D2 together ran to about 17GB RAM at its peak.

Jim


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## meywd (May 11, 2015)

Jim Saunders said:


> KeithBreazeal said:
> 
> 
> > What is the limit to the number of frames LR6 will stitch?
> ...



I only have 12GB of RAM, so when i tried to stitch 35 frames it took 2 hours


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## scyrene (May 12, 2015)

meywd said:


> Jim Saunders said:
> 
> 
> > KeithBreazeal said:
> ...



I've done up to 50-60 5D3 shots, and it can take a long time. For very large ones, I reckon converting to smaller jpegs might be worth doing, but you'd have to pre-process, as you lose a lot of editing latitude afterwards of course.

PS it's a lot faster with smooth gradations - sky and out of focus backgrounds - than busy areas like leaves or grass.



Lloyd said:


> I tried LR6 pano for the first time on some snapshots I took using my wife’s SL1 and a 10-22mm lens I brought along on a backpacking trip through the Anasazi Indian ruins in the Grand Gulch in Utah. It was hard for me to form a final judgment as these were not well thought out shots and such a wide angle lens may create its own problems when stitching. Nevertheless, LR6 seemed to work as well as the first pass through photoshop and was it easy. However, Photoshop, as a much more advanced program, gives you a lot more options to correct distortion with its transform menu of skew, distort, warp etc.



You can apply distortions, transformations etc. to the finished panorama in the 'manual lens adjustments' pane in Lightroom. It's no doubt less powerful, but can help with overall composition and perspective.


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## Lloyd (May 13, 2015)

scyrene said:


> You can apply distortions, transformations etc. to the finished panorama in the 'manual lens adjustments' pane in Lightroom. It's no doubt less powerful, but can help with overall composition and perspective.



Thank you, I will have to take a look at "manual adjustments" pane.


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