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MichielB-Private
MichielB-Private
Participant
December 30, 2025
Question

Sky banding in Lightroom classic / stitching panoramas

  • December 30, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 526 views

Hi,

 

when stitching panoramas in Lightroom classic (macOS), I get heavy banding / unexpected (blue) color gradients in the sky sections - so both when Lightroom is simply stitching panoramas (not happening when stitching through Photoshop 2026), but especially noticeable when using the functionality "Fill edges" - it's basically completely unusable since version 15.1.

 

See example attached, for comparison between stitching with or without filling edges...

By the way, the result comes out exactly like this - also when exporting the resulting file (to Jpeg or tiff ort whatever), it looks exactly the same; in Photoshop stitching works like a charm though, result as always... So I'd say, it's definitely a Lightroom Classic bug.

Maybe some of your devs played with the Ai too much, in order to speed things up in Lightroom, and it wasn't tested thoroughly in Beta versions of course - since app. most users don't notice anyway (at least I didn't read any other bug reports on this so far) and Adobe always does Beta testing in regular Production versions? Just guessing at what might have possibly caused this 🙂

 

So apart from the question, whether one would like to use this function "Fill edges" at all (since the quality of the output is often more problematic than helpful); but at least one could partially use it in the past, for easily filling sky portions, which were missed in panoramas. It's really funny, it's not even capable of doing this anymore, and apparently, the whole panorama stitching functionality has been basically destroyed by the recent update. Not so good....

 

Please fix, thanks & regards.

2 replies

J
Community Expert
Jao vdLCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 1, 2026

I've seen this problem for a long time on files from my Nikon Z7. It appears the vignette correction is not applied correctly before stitching. Which is no surprise since I know the built in lens profile based vignette correction is not quite correct even on single images so you get this kind of banding on overlapping areas. Indeed Photoshop has no problem with these since I think it calculates its own vignette correction based on overlap instead of using a lens profile. It is usually subtle for me and can be corrected but yeah it would definitely be amplified by filling in off missing areas which I rarely do.

    MichielB-Private
    MichielB-PrivateAuthor
    Participant
    January 1, 2026

    Ok, sounds like a logical explanation, although this didn't used to happen until recently; but maybe some changes were made to the lens profiles / vignette correction system by Adobe?

    A
    Community Manager
    AlekeCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    December 31, 2025

    Hi @MichielB-Private, thanks for reaching out! Sorry to hear you’re running into issues with Lightroom Classic.
    Quick question, does this happen every time you use panorama stitching with Fill Edges, or only with certain files? Also, what image file format are you working with?
    If you’re able to share a couple of sample RAW files, that would really help us test on our end.
    As a first step, you might try resetting your LrC preferences:
    https://adobe.ly/49g5OhD
    Thanks so much!
    Alek

    *(If you mention me with an @, like @Aleke, I’ll get a notification and can respond faster.)*
    MichielB-Private
    MichielB-PrivateAuthor
    Participant
    January 1, 2026

    Hi Alek,

    Ok I renamed the prefs, rebooted, issue still occurs... It's occurring on DNG files, imported from a Lumix GH4, so original file format = .RW2; in Lightroom’s Library module, the files are shown as “filename.dng+JPEG” (since Lightroom imports both files).

    Note: as mentioned, it also happens when not using the "Fill edges" functionality, though less severe (quote: "both when Lightroom is simply stitching panoramas (not happening when stitching through Photoshop 2026), but especially noticeable when using the functionality "Fill edges").
    I copied the same screenshot back in, and marked the image portions with the dark banding in red, in case you didn’t notice.
    And again, as mentioned, Photoshop 2026 can stitch those files just fine – no banding, so from my perspective this already clearly points out, the issue is with Lightroom (not with the file format or such - though it could theoretically be related).
    Let me know, if you’d like me to upload the 12 DNG files, used for this panorama.

    Best regards, Michiel

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