11 Replies Latest reply: Sep 20, 2011 3:15 PM by Jao vdL RSS

    Merge to Panorama Work Flow?

    StreetwiseCreative Community Member

      Hello,

       

      When one uses the "Merge to Panorama in Photoshop" command, a 16-bit TIFF is created and brought back into LR.  Is it better to make image corrections to all of the RAW files BEFORE using this command? Alternatively, is there just as much latitude with a 16-bit TIFF as there is with a RAW file for image corrections?

       

      What do you folks do?

       

      Thanks in advance.

       

      Dave

        • 1. Re: Merge to Panorama Work Flow?
          Lee Jay Community Member

          StreetwiseCreative wrote:


          Is it better to make image corrections to all of the RAW files BEFORE using this command?

           

          Yes, as long as they are global and you don't use fill light or recovery (which are local, internally).

          • 2. Re: Merge to Panorama Work Flow?
            ChuckTribolet Community Member

            If you were to do the same amount of fill light and/or recovery to each image, what would be wrong with that?

            What do you mean by local?

            And would black level be the same as fill light and recovery?

             

             

            Chuck

            • 3. Re: Merge to Panorama Work Flow?
              Lee Jay Community Member

              Not sure.  Fill light and recovery are applied to masked areas of the image, it's just that the masks are determined internally and I'm not sure that methodology is completely insensitive to the other areas of the image.

               

              Blacks, contrast, exposure, and brightness are certainly global.  Same with tone curve and the color controls.

              • 4. Re: Merge to Panorama Work Flow?
                ChuckTribolet Community Member

                Neither Evening nor Kelby (LR2 editions, my LR3 editions are elsewhere) mention masking with respect to fill light and recovery.  They imply that it's an algorithmic swizzle on the conversion from raw to pixels. If that's the case, I suspect they would work OK if you were preprocessing before a panorama and made sure that the fill light and recovery values were used consistently across all segments of the panorama.

                 

                I'm actually going to go a step further.  I've got a shot in mind that requires a person to be in three different parts of the picture.  It will be shot through the door into a two-car garage (person on left, middle, and right) and I may need HDR to get the exterior and interior to both be OK..  The camera won't move between the three setups.  I'll HDR each setup individuall, then slice the HDRed setups, but I'll slice the picture into three parts and use panorama software to glue them together.  On the other hand, I've got enough slaveable strobes that I may be able to just just blast a lot of light in the garage door (maybe mount a couple of strobes above the roll-up garage door to light the back) and not have to do HDR.

                 

                 

                Chuck

                • 5. Re: Merge to Panorama Work Flow?
                  effeegee Community Member

                  I prefer the LR route, not least because it makes editing easier and the workflow is quick.. If you want to retain a non-destructive workflow leading up to the Panorama - to cater for later variations/editions - then LR is the place to make all adjustments on one image and synchronise across the group. This might also work with 'local' adjustments e.g. graduated filter - so long as they can remain the same in each and be synchronised.   Re Lee Jay's point I think the the algorithm which creates the masks for fill and recovery will impact indivdual frames differently producing a different result if applied to the merged print - not least because it is no longer a RAW file. (You pays your money and makes your choice once you are in TIFF in PS.) 

                   

                  I've just started wondering whether manual distortions - rather than profile based corrections could be used creatively to change the merged file shape. Or, would the paths for merging change too much?  

                  • 6. Re: Merge to Panorama Work Flow?
                    Jao vdL Community Member

                    Neither Evening nor Kelby (LR2 editions, my LR3 editions are elsewhere) mention masking with respect to fill light and recovery.  They imply that it's an algorithmic swizzle on the conversion from raw to pixels. If that's the case, I suspect they would work OK if you were preprocessing before a panorama and made sure that the fill light and recovery values were used consistently across all segments of the panorama.

                    Yeah that is not right. The Shadow fill, recovery and clarity are done using automatically generated masks. In principle, you do not want to apply them before merging panoramas as you might get lighting issues in areas that in one shot might be in a large shadow area and in the next shot might be only a smaller area that is hardly affected by the shadow fill slider. This is probably not a big deal when you only apply small amounts of these local contrast HDR-like adjustments but when you do large amounts you are going to want to do it after the panorama merge. The way to do this is to develop all source images very flat using only standard (i.e. no shadow fill, recovery or clarity) sliders, making sure you do not clip highlights and blacks more than you need (generally you are shooting for no clipping) and that you keep contrast low. Make sure to apply all adjustments equally to all images. Then merge to panorama and bring the result back into Lightroom and then do all the adjustments including shadow fills, recovery, clarity etc.

                     

                    P.S. It is best to not use PS for panoramas in my opinion. It is very inflexible and fails at them quite badly if you have anything but the simplest of image sets.

                     

                    I'm actually going to go a step further.  I've got a shot in mind that requires a person to be in three different parts of the picture.  It will be shot through the door into a two-car garage (person on left, middle, and right) and I may need HDR to get the exterior and interior to both be OK..  The camera won't move between the three setups.  I'll HDR each setup individuall, then slice the HDRed setups, but I'll slice the picture into three parts and use panorama software to glue them together.  On the other hand, I've got enough slaveable strobes that I may be able to just just blast a lot of light in the garage door (maybe mount a couple of strobes above the roll-up garage door to light the back) and not have to do HDR.

                     

                    I've done this sort of thing many times in landscapes. The best results are obtained by stitching similar exposures first into separate panoramas and then combining those. My favorite panorama software hugin does this really well as you can just dump all images in there, align them and have it spit out assembled separated exposure layers that you can have it combine for you using the built-in enfuse (awesome open source software for natural-looking HDR). You can also put the separate assembled exposure as layers in Photoshop and combine using masks or the built in HDR function or import them into dedicated HDR software such as panomatix.

                     

                    That said, I think you will get the very best results if you light this particular scene correctly yourself. Strobes are usually the way to go if you have them.

                    • 7. Re: Merge to Panorama Work Flow?
                      trshaner Community Member

                      As Jao said and I concur, anyone looking to make serious panoramas should look at Hugin. I have worked with PS CS5 'Photomerge' and the freeware program Hugin to create panoramas. Hands down Hugin is far superior to PS CS5 Photomerge for ability to seamlessly merge images and correct for lens distortion and vignetting. It also has provisions to "fine-tune" the image points used for merging the images and removing visible seam areas. This is where PS fails quite often and Hugin shines! For the Hugin workflow I suggest doing your basic image corrections in LR and then exporting as 16 bit TIF. Hugin also supports HDR images.

                       

                      WARNING: Hugin is not for the faint of heart! If you have a background in software development, then this your baby. For us other mere mortals there are also precompiled downloads available at the below link for both Windows and Mac.

                       

                      Scroll down to 'Precompiled Downloads' here:

                       

                      http://hugin.sourceforge.net/download/

                       

                      General info:

                       

                      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugin_(software)

                       

                      Hugin site on Sourceforge:

                       

                      http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

                       

                      Hugin Tutorials:

                       

                      http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/index.shtml

                       

                      There are also many YouTube tutorials available - Search: 'Hugin Panorama'

                      • 8. Re: Merge to Panorama Work Flow?
                        JimHess Community Member

                        I have found that if I set the camera to Manual mode and take all images with the same settings, then I can make synchronized changes to the raw images before I create the panorama.  I meter on the " most important" part of the image and then use that setting to take all images regardless of what is indicated in the viewfinder.  Then I make global synchronized adjustments to the raw images before merging to a panorama.  After the panorama is created is when I do local adjustments to emphasize highlights or what ever.  Not saying it is the only way or the best way.  It's just the way that works best for me.

                         

                        Added later: I might add that I do all of my panorama work with Photomerge in Photoshop.  A lot of people seem to be convinced that it is not a good choice for panoramas.  But using the workflow that I have described here I find that it does an excellent job.

                        • 9. Re: Merge to Panorama Work Flow?
                          StreetwiseCreative Community Member

                          Jao vdL wrote:

                           

                          (i.e. no shadow fill, recovery or clarity)

                           

                          By shadow fill, do you mean "Fill Light" or "Blacks" slider(s)? Also, I'm assuming you set everything to "0"? The default setting for "Blacks" is 5.

                           

                          Thanks. I'm going to check out Hugin. Sounds nice.

                          • 10. Re: Merge to Panorama Work Flow?
                            effeegee Community Member

                            Thank you. Hugin looks like the next stage for serious panoramas and more but I'm a mere mortal and the geeky environment is a little challenging.  Just trying out some more 'sophisticated' tasks in PS CS5 photomerge from LR caused first a crash and then a very 'confused' result.  I'll revisit my workflow very soon - Hugin should solve some of the problems I gave up on a while ago blaming the originals. 

                            • 11. Re: Merge to Panorama Work Flow?
                              Jao vdL Community Member

                              Yeah I mean Fill light. Getting my terminology mixed up there. With the

                              blacks slider what I usually do is to go to the image with the blackest

                              areas and make sure that I do not see any clipping (click on the triangle).

                              This is usually somewhat below the default of 5. Basically what you want to

                              do is to make all the edits as non-destructive for the exported tiff as you

                              can. Blacks really cuts off information in the dark areas which is why I

                              make sure there is minimal clipping there. Same for highlight clipping.

                              Usually, even at default settings, clipped highlights might actually

                              indicate there is still information in the original raw data, so it makes

                              sense to back off exposure then to rescue them in the raw stage before

                              baking in for the panoramic stitching and losing this information in the

                              process. I do all of this in auto-sync mode to make sure all edits are

                              applied to all images making up the panorama. Hugin is only one choice BTW.

                              Autopano Pro is quite good, and if you run windows, people seem to like

                              autostitch. Hugin on the other hand is free and flexible to a fault almost.

                              Extremely powerful but comes with a steep learning curve.

                               

                              I do most of my stitching to create very large high resolution images for

                              very large prints BTW. See here for more info:

                              http://lagemaat.blogspot.com/2011/02/resolution-of-stitched-images-revisited.html and

                              http://lagemaat.blogspot.com/2010/10/can-you-stitch-waterfalls.html