Auto photomerge doesn't work with high-res images properly

[norbertj15305618]

Hey Guys,

i'm having an issue with photoshop CC...

I'm trying to make a panoramic photo from 15 images.

If i'm using the original photo resolution (24mp), it doesn't do it properly, see photo:

First of all, it doesn't use any masking layers. You could see the edges of the separate photos, so the tones doesn't match, nor the lines in some areas. (I used manual mode, the exposure, iso, focal length, etc was the same for all photos)

Then I did the same Photomerge with the same photos, but I downsized them to 1000px wide in Lightroom. Now the results were good:

Does anyone knows how this could be solved? I need extra high resolution photos so I can't settle the lower quality.

Thank you!

N.

[Trevor.Dennis]

Wow, that really didn't do good. 

Out of interest, what is your rough system spec?

How long did it take with the 24Mp images?   15 source images at 24Mp is pushing your system, and Photomerge does not use system resources particularly well.  I expected great things from a newly built i9-7900X with 64Gb RAM and a couple of uber-fast M.2 drives, but Photomerge shows no improvement over my previous system.  In fact I think it uses very few CPU cores/threads, and possibly only one core. 

It would also need a significant Scratch file, so a lot of reading and writing to the drive.  All of which slows things down.  But I would have thought that accuracy would still be OK.

If you started with Lightroom, did you use the camera/lens profile?  I don't use Lightroom, but we have the same thing in ACR.  I think this would  help Photoshop make a more accurate merge.

From your screenshots, I think you have three rows (of five?).  I've seen Russell Brown set up large Photomerge projects where he takes care to centre around a particular shot.  We had a link to the Russell Brown tutorials which I have lost moving to my new system.  Does anyone else remember it?  I think Dag was involved with the discussion.

[norbertj15305618]

Hey,

thanks for responding.

Yes, I'm thinking maybe my system can't handle it, but it should at least let me know if that is the reason. It is a HP laptop, Intel i7-6500U CPU, 16 gb RAM, windows 10, with two graphics card: Intel HD Graphics 520 and AMD Radeon R7 M340. I have about 10 gbs free space on my SSD HDD. Maybe that is not enough, i try that out.

I think it took about 3-4-5 mins to do the merge.

Yes, I did apply lens correction.

3 rows in total.

Now i'm experimenting with superresolution. I have 15mm lens which with I can cover the area that I want, but as I need more than 24 mp, this might work out. Like here: https://petapixel.com/2015/02/21/a-practical-guide-to-creating-superresolution-photos-with-photoshop...

[D Fosse]

norbertj15305618  wrote

I have about 10 gbs free space on my SSD HDD.

That's nowhere near enough! The scratch file for something like this will easily exceed that. Free space for the scratch disk should at least be in the 100 to 150GB range.

I think Dag was involved with the discussion

No, that wasn't me - but I always, routinely, pick a center frame and put that at the bottom of the stack. Lock it or turn it into a Background layer. All the other frames will align to this.

And as always, take great care to minimize or eliminate parallax error. The slightest misalignment between shots can throw the whole thing off.

Oh, one more thing - you have a lot more control if you split the Photomerge script into its constituent parts: Auto-align > Auto-blend. With Photomerge you're in the passenger seat.

[norbertj15305618 · Accepted solution]

Hey,

it seems the lack of free space was the problem. Now I had around 20 gbs, and it did the trick.

Thanks for the extra info though!

N.