Intermittent error trying to merge panoramas

[jamestavet]

Hey there, I have an inconsistent error when merging images into a panorama, sometimes the tool works fine and as expected but on occasion it will run the merge without giving me the option box first so it just fires out a new merged image often giving me a panorama that i am unhappy with. IE I have been unable to select the creation type (spherical, perspective etc) and adjust options like fill edges or the boundary warp etc. I find when this happens, no matter how often i try run the merge panorama tool it will just fire the image out without the options, then i will try again another day and it will work just fine. Has anyone else experienced this?  

[Moved from ‘Bugs’ to ‘Discussions’ by moderator, according to forum rules.]

[jamestavet]

Sorry, the topic should be Intermittant error trying to merge panoramas, i dont see a way to edit this?

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

I've updated your title.

[johnrellis]

"DirectX: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (31.0.15.2879)"

Likely not the cause your issue, but your System Info shows you have an old graphics driver (528.79, from 3/2023).   LR is very sensitive to bugs in graphics drivers (of which there are many), so best to update directly from Nvidia:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/232934/

[jamestavet]

Thanks so much for flagging this! I keep on top of my pc updates but always forget to check the NVIDIA drivers 🤦‍:male_sign:

[johnrellis]

It sounds like sometimes LR is doing a so-called headless merge (not bringing up the Merge window) but just starting the merge with the last-used settings.  Normally, you invoke headless merge with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl Shift M.

1. Are you using the menu command Photo > Photo Merge > Panorama or a keyboard shortcut?

2. If you're using the keyboard shortcut, try using the menu command instead (to see if the issue is with the keyboard shortcut).

3. If you're using the keyboard shortcut, perhaps your Caps Lock key is sometimes on by accident?

[jamestavet]

So I have actually realised what the issue was...

Basically this was happening when I was enhancing images before stitching them (No longer necessary with the latest update to LR as you can now simply enhance/denoise the resulting pano.dng from your merge).  But yea, this seems to happen when you don't first collapse the enhanced images and ctrl+select the inidividual enhanced images you wish to merge, if you just select the enhanced image with the raw image still underneath (when it says 2 in the top left corner) it seems to assume you want both the enhanced and the raw image as part of the merge and then jumps to a "headless-merge" and can come up with some pretty funky results. 

[johnrellis]

Right, that explains it.

In general, when select multiple collapsed stacks and invoke Photo > Photo Merge, LR will start a batch headless merge on each stack. 

For example, suppose you've taken a large number of photos with exposure bracketing.  You can use Photo > Stacking > Auto-Stacking By Capture Time to group each set of bracketed photos into their own stack.  Then you can select all the stacks and do Photo > Photo Merge > HDR to create HDR merges for each stack.

This obviously isn't useful when each stack contains the original raw and its denoised DNG.