Panorama HDR highlight blown

[Sauron84]

When creating a vertical hdr panorama of 4 photo, each one of them composed by 5 photo in hdr, I've highlight blown even if the information are all there in the underexposed shots. It seems like lightroom, when clicking hdr panorama tries to uniform the shot by lifting the shadows and burning the highlights of the composed photo. I've already checked that when clicking hdr panorama the "automatic settings" is NOT selected. Attached you can find the result. I've also tried first to created the single hdr, and then creating the panorama but the results are the same...

[GoldingD]

1. I will not assume, instead I will ask.

You are NOT making any edits to the master RAW photos before attempting the Photo Merge HDR Panorama, correct?

Photo Merge in LrC should ignore any such edits, but what if?

[GoldingD]

2. A possible oddity

Remember that Photo Merge HDR will present you with a screen with options like Auto Tone, prepopulated per how you used the Merge last.

Now you do not see that screen in a Photo Merge HDR Panorama. So perhaps bring up a Photo Merge HDR, make sure Auto Tone is off, merge one, then go to Photo Merge HDR Panorama.

Just a what if.

[GoldingD]

3. Most selected photo. When you select all the photos to merge, try changing the most selected photo. I do not know what exposure may work best, but if your exposure bracket is from under exposed to overexposed, perhaps the default most selected photo is an underexposed one, and I suspect that would not be helpful, maybe change to the center one.

[Sauron84]

Hi, thanks for answering 🙂

1) I've tried both, no editing and also tried to balance every file recovering highlights and lifting shadows...but lr hdr panorama seems to ignore those settings...

2) Good idea, I didn't know that! Unfortunately I've tried but the result is the same...highlights burnt....

3) I'm using 5 shots from a DJI drone, the order LR import those photos is: overexposed shot, correct shot, over-overexposed shot, very dark shot and most overexposed of the all the shots.

[Sauron84 · Accepted solution]

I've found a solution by myself, as usual Adobe Customer Support wasn't helpful... So you need to create the hdr from the single files, then tune them to have an average exposure (recover the highlights and lift the shadows...). Then you need to open the HDR files created in Photoshop and create a panorama. I don't know why if you do this in LR it will blow your highlights...

[yoeldiamante]

thanks for sharing. i will try.

[JohanElzenga]

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@Sauron84 wrote:

I've found a solution by myself, as usual Adobe Customer Support wasn't helpful... So you need to create the hdr from the single files, then tune them to have an average exposure (recover the highlights and lift the shadows...). Then you need to open the HDR files created in Photoshop and create a panorama. I don't know why if you do this in LR it will blow your highlights...

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There may be two issues here. First of all, there may be an issue with DJI files. I have seen more reports about clipped highlights after merging images from DJI drones, although I have not experienced issues with my own Mavic Air 2 files so far. Lightroom only has partial support for DJI DNG files. It reads them just fine, but you may have noticed that it does not have the usual raw profiles for DJI.

Secondly, it may have something to do with the way you expose the shots. If you use automatic exposure, then the brackets of the sky part will be quite different from the brackets of the bottom part. That difference will still be there after the brackets are merged to HDR, and so during panorama merge Lightroom has to compensate for that. Usually Lightroom is pretty good at that, but that may be where DJI files somehow are different and more complicated for Lightroom. Remember that Lightroom merges unedited files, so first merging to HDR and then tweaking the HDR images before you merge them to panorama won't make any difference. If you did indeed use auto exposure, then it may be worth trying manual exposure to see if that makes a difference.