Known Participant

P: Pano merge of iPhone HDR images result in uneven exposure

Forum|Forum|6 months ago
August 2, 2025
5 replies
841 views

Hi, using latest Lightroom Classic on MacOS 26. I have found that sometimes LRC gets confused about the exposure. I have a two image example where the images are exposed exactly the same but the resulting pano is messed up. One half of the resulting pano is exposed correctly, the other half is light. I've only seen this in iPhone RAW HDR images. The one I kept was from Apple Camera but I've also seen it using Project Indigo camera.

On the Indigo forum, another person was complaining about pano issues (black bars ending up in panos). I've also seen this issue and have example RAW images.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-ecosystem-cloud-based-discussions/p-introducing-the-project-indigo-camera-app/m-p/15440106/page/21#M106426

I tried attaching example files but that failed. How can I get images to the Lightroom team?

[moved from bugs to discussions according to the community rules - Mod.]

macOS

R

Russ WrightAuthor

Known Participant

No worries, thanks in advance for fixing this issue 🙂

johnrellis

Legend

"hopefully a fix in Camera Raw will also fix this behavior in Lightroom Classic?"

LR includes an embedded copy of Camera Raw. The entire LR / CR ecosystem releases about every 8 weeks, and it will include the latest version of CR. We might expect to see LR 14.5 next week or the one thereafter (8 weeks after LR 14.4). Given this bug was just filed, I think it's more likely that 14.6 would include a fix rather than 14.5.

R

Russ WrightAuthor

Known Participant

Ok, hopefully a fix in Camera Raw will also fix this behavior in Lightroom Classic? I never use Camera Raw directly.

Rikk Flohr_Photography

Community Manager

Thanks for the sample files. I've logged a bug with the Camera Raw team to investigate the issue.

Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org

johnrellis

Legend

Upload the pics to Wetransfer, Dropbox, Google Drive or similar free service and post the sharing link here.

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Russ WrightAuthor

Known Participant

Here you go. There are two folders-

1) Exposure contains two images that when LRC tries to create a pano from them fails to get the exposure correct.

2) black border - contains two images with messed up borders due to iOS or Project Indigo bug. Even when you crop out the right sides of the image, when you try to create a pano with LRC it still uses the black border and gets confused.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/aa2qr4ls17ovyxfandg3y/AAdsvTLGd4_DTdejeuimp_0?rlkey=kmxhbc8uzom032dazxx5a91pn&st=9sfobv0b&dl=0

I'll be deleting the dropbox files in a few weeks so copy them please.

johnrellis

Legend

[This post contains formatting and embedded images that don't appear in email. View the post in your Web browser.]

Re the Exposure example with the two iPhone 16 Pro Max Apple ProRaw DNGs:

Photo Merge > Panorama gets both the exposure and the colors completely wrong:

A workaround is to export the two DNGs back to the catalog as TIFFs in the Proraw color space, and then merge those:

There won't be any visually noticeable difference in quality.

You're also stumbling over another bug with merging Apple ProRaw DNGs, where Photo Merge is not setting the profile correctly:

However, the symptoms in that bug report did not include getting the merged exposure wrong or the colors so wrong, so this bug report should not be merged with that one.

But given that bug report is two years old and hasn't been fixed, I wouldn't expect that this bug would be fixed any time soon (if ever) either.

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