P: add HDRI \ Equirectangular Projection

I used the Mavic mini2 I borrowed from a friend recently and it's a very fun toy which has an automatic 360 panorama mode, Where are you Press the shutter, Wait 30 seconds and you have a perfect panorama from anywhere in space above you. its even RAW and not JPG. Amazing!

Import to Lightroom \ Photomerge \ Edit in Photoshop(Beta)  \ Filter-Distortion-Polar Coordinates-

gets you a nice Stereographic Projection...

And here, you notice that the middle/bottom is messed up because light room doesn't stitch the bottom properly, though the shot of the bottom exists, it's just that the panorama Editor has never been updated and brought up to date for a real professional workflow. As it is with many other things, it's kind of been forgotten because it's good enough for most and the rest... well...

{There does exist one other good panorama stitching tool I am aware of called PTgui / Hugin unfortunately that is based on open source and also hasn't been updated since the turn of the century. at this point you are most likely to give up on it and move on, because the spark of inspiration has been crushed by technicality}

How nice it would be to have in one of the future updates, a revamp / update of the Panorama stitcher in Lightroom, one that would again place at the top of the foodchain of the Panorama Photography world.

So finally, here is a list of the features I would think would be very AWESOME to for Panoramas in LR.

1.

add HDRI \ Equirectangular Projection -

for perfect 2:1 Aspect Ratio Panoramas with aligment correction so that you can Reframe (!!!) and choose what the middle is  - {HDRI seems to be the standard for storing a 360º information as a 2D image. Seems like a pretty important feature to include give the fact that it's a panorama stitcher for working professionals. just sayin'}

2. 

360º Projections -

Mainly Stereographic for making 'Tiny Planet' w/ distortion correction for controling the Proportions of the sides vs. the middle and the stretching of the outer layers to fit the frame etc...

{would be an amazing tool to have especially given the meteoric rise in Quality and popularity of 360 cameras like the Gopro Max and Insta360 R.}

3.

Control of rating, flagging and colour labelling inside the editor window -

{When I was using an older Mac, it was agony to wait for every panorama to stitch, especially big ones could take minutes, but by the time you're already progressed in the edit and then have to go back and Rate the panorama as part of the selection. Just, put the controls in the panorama stitcher so that I can choose to flag and star it as it comes out. Especially useful when stitching many many panoramas in sequence can be very tedious and time-consuming.}

4.

Ai People correction -

especially now that AI power tools can find people. It doesn't seem unreasonable to ask that it doesn't stitch peoples hands/heads off, making a panorama unusable/weird.

5. 

a Resize option - 

Not every panorama should be 12,000 pixels wide, especially in RAW format, how nice it would be to set inside inside the Editor and have it be resized automatically when it stitched.

6.

Manual correction keyframes - 

for when the panorama doesn't stitch though its clearly a panorama. 

{Clicking on things that are the same object in the different photos that make the panorama so that lightroom has key frames to base it's stitch on. also very useful when it does stitch but wrong. Give your panorama a second chance at life}

7.

a Batch Render Feature - {On the newest systems, it's not as important, but on all the older machines it could definately save many many peoples life and sanity.}

i had something else but cant remember 😉

anyway, these are my 5 cents on how the panorama stitcher could be massively improved

would love to hear your thoughts in the matter. 

Cheers & happy Stitching!

p.s.

thanx for reading this far. you are a hero because you care. the world need more of you.

Rating, People Correction, Resize, Manual Correction, Batch Re