Creating an HDR panorama?

[Kaitlyn2004]

I have a panorama at sunset and as a result, the left side of my frame is far brighter than my right. I've created bracketed shots for the panorama and all is good for the source files.

My typical workflow was all in lightroom:

1) Create HDRs of each set of bracketed shots

2) Merge the HDRs into a panorama

This ends up losing the dynamic range when stitching the shots together. I tried going the other way, creating 3 panoramas (1 and each exposure bracket) but the resulting images are SLIGHTLY different dimensions and both LR+photoshop complain and say they can't be merged. And LR provides no method to crop the photo to a pixel value (that I'm aware of?). Plus, although I obviously haven't been able to merge them yet, I worry this could potentially lead to the most quality degradation as each pano stitch could have stitched/warped the photos inconsistently.

Any ideas how to solve this problem?

[Todd Shaner]

Kaitlyn2004  wrote

My typical workflow was all in lightroom:

1) Create HDRs of each set of bracketed shots

2) Merge the HDRs into a panorama

This ends up losing the dynamic range when stitching the shots together.

What are you actually seeing that makes you think dynamic range is being lost and using what controls in LR? What happens when you apply -100 Highlights, +100 Shadows, and then adjust the other Tone controls (Exposure Whites, and Blacks)? The dynamic range is in the LR HDR DNG file, but you need to apply the correct Tone control settings to reveal it. 

[Kaitlyn2004]

The histogram is indicating blown highlights

[Todd Shaner · Accepted solution]

The LR Histogram does not show the actual raw data highlight clipping in the Photo Merge> HDR DNG file. Did you actually try to adjust the DNG HDR image as I suggested? See an example below.