LR wide panorama merge problem

[Pavol Novak]

Hello, I would like to ask, why there is a problem with LR when merging HDR wide panoramas. Quite often it happens, that the midpoint of panorama is not in the middle of merged preview and final panorama is cut on one side, but continue on other side. See attached photo. How to merge it correctly? Am I doing something wrong?

 

[johnrellis]

Upload a problem set of originals to Dropbox or similar and post the sharing link here, and we can investigate.

[Pavol Novak]

Hi John, thansk for reply... I exported all raws to jpgs due to file size and are available here: https://we.tl/t-Mwnm8d0UP1
Just for information, preview panorama  is merged from raws, therefore it looks little different.

Hhanks for help.

[Jao vdL]

This is a known problem with the panorama merge function in Lightroom. That and that it often makes very bowed horizon lines. Due to the lack of controls, you can't do anything about it unfortunately. The problem here seems to be that the very bottom of the rightmost image overlaps slightly with the bottom of the very left most image and it therefore thinks it is a 360 degree panorama. For this sort of image you should use a dedicated panorama program because also Photoshop's panorama merge will have problems. I like hugin for panoramas such as this but unfortunately it hasn't been updated in years and doesn't run well on current versions of Mac OS X and Windows but there are many other panorama merge tools that give far better control than Lightroom.

[johnrellis]

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

To build on that, here's the resulting panorama with left halves of the top-left and bottom-left photos cropped out, avoiding the false overlap detection with the right side of the panorama:

Using that as a workaround would be tedious, though, since Merge ignores previously applied crops.  So you'd have to crop and then export/reimport all the images as TIFFs and then merge those.

LR does much better than PS though -- here are its spherical and cylindrical merges:

(All of these tests were non-HDR merges, using the third photo of each bracket.)

[Pavol Novak]

Thanks for reply. I have used couple programms for panorama merge, but non of them had sufficient HDR result from bracked photos. I like HDR output from LR, therefore I merging panos in LR. Also I have merged panorama from raw files without any tiff exports and so on... This problem is not first time, sometimes it happens on panorama and there is not overlap at all and little piece form one side appears on another side.

[Pavol Novak]

Thanks John for reply, but I explained before, why I use LR to merge panorama. Because quick merge from raw bracked files, result is dng file and I like hdr output from LR. It looks nice and natural without much of effort. Sometimes this problem appears when there is not overlap at all. To be honest, crop the photos on the end of panorama/exports/imports and mering is not what I would like to do to have final panorama.

[Jao vdL]

Completely agree that the dng output is a great feature that really distinguishes Lightroom. However the problems you mention have been long recognized so we're just cautioning as fellow users of this product that it is unfortunately unlikely that adobe will fix this anytime soon. You can get hdr output from other products too by the way. Hugin for example will output openexr files for example. It merges your files beautifully.

[Pavol Novak]

Thanks for info. I will try Hugin in that cases and will see... Hope, problem in LR will be resolved soon...

[johnrellis]

Converting the raws to 16-bit TIFFs often loses very little useful information, so you very possibly could get visually indistinguishable results. But I agree that's a tedious workaround at best.

[Jao vdL]

Hugin will output 32-bit tiff HDR files that Lightroom will read and edit. They work great as pseudo raw files.

[Pavol Novak]

Hello, I would like to ask, why there is a problem with LR when merging HDR wide panoramas. Quite often it happens, that the midpoint of panorama is not in the middle of merged preview and final panorama is cut on one side, but continue on other side. See attached photo. How to merge it correctly?

[Pavol Novak]

Sorry, toppic should be in Lightroom Classic. Don't know how to move it... 😞

[johnrellis]

Moderators, @Rikk Flohr: Photography,  this is a duplicate post with the author's other post (which has extensive discussion):

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-bugs/lr-wide-panorama-merge-problem/idi-p/12859767

[Todd Shaner]

It looks like there isn't enough overlap (25-50%) on one or more of the image files. Please post a screenshot of the filmstrip showing the files you are trying to merge..

[Todd Shaner]

Please add all comments at the post @johnrellis  refers to above.