Quick and easy steps to learn how to panorama merge within Lightroom Classic CC.
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Joe Fitzpatrick with Understand Photography teaches how to use Lightroom Classic CC to quickly and easily create panoramas. If you’re shooting raw, you won’t lose any tonality and color info as the finished panorama will be in Adobe’s DNG raw format. If you’re shooting JPEG’s you won’t have any compression loss for the same reason.
Adobe suggests that you edit after merging your images. Local corrections, transform, lens corrections, and crop will be ignored. The maximum size for the finished image is 512 MB or 65,000 pixels on the long side.
Select your images in the library module. If your images are not in order, click and drag to put them in order. Then select them all. Right click inside any of the images. Choose photo merge and panorama. This will bring up the panorama merge preview.
Lightroom provides three methods of merging the images. Spherical aligns and transforms the images as if they were mapped to the inside of a sphere. This projection mode is great for really wide and multi row panoramas.
Cylindrical projects the panorama as if it were mapped to the inside of a cylinder. This projection mode works really well for wide panoramas and it also keeps vertical lines straight.
Perspective projects the panorama as if it were mapped to a flat surface. Since this method keeps straight lines straight, it’s great for architectural photography. Really wide panoramas may not work well with this mode.
If Lightroom is unable to merge using the method you choose, you will get an unable to merge message. Simply choose another method if this happens. Auto crop, crops the image to remove blank canvas. You can also crop after merging using a crop tool in the develop module.
Boundary work fills the canvas by stretching or compressing the image edges to preserve image content near the edges. Use caution using this with images with lots of distinct lines and edges. Once you’ve made your choices click merge.
You’ll be returned to the library module. The progress bar will show you the merger progress. Time to complete varies depending on number and size of images, as well as computer speed. Once the panorama is complete you can edit the image using your normal editing workflow.
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~ Joe Fitzpatrick is the lead instructor and workshop leader at Understand Photography. He is one of that rare breed of photographers who possesses both a vast array of technical knowledge and the ability to communicate it in clear, simple terms. Joe is the type of person who needs to know how everything works. If he doesn’t know, he’ll figure it out! And then he’ll simplify it so that the rest of us can understand!