Panorama Merge not working in Light Room

[TrevorParker]

I have 10 photos I'm looking to stitch together to form a panorama. They are all overlapping a large amount (almost half), and there was no zoom between photos. Is there anything I can do to salvage the photos? I've tried stitching them in photoshop as well, and perspective does not work, the others look really bad (morph the horizon).

[Sahil.Chawla]

Hi Trevor,

We're sorry to hear about this, could you please let us know what version of Lightroom you're working on and which operating system are you using?

Did you try restarting the computer and see if it helps?

Regards,
Sahil

[TrevorParker]

Hi Sahil,

Thanks for the response. I'm using Windows 10 and lightroom CC version 2015.14. I've just restarted my PC and have gotten the same results.

-Trevor

[TrevorParker]

I'm able to stitch any two constituent photos together, but am unable to stitch three photos together in the perspective mode.

[Ian Lyons]

You mentioned in first post that the overlap is almost half, and later that merging two photos works fine. Have you tried to stitch 3 or more photos in perspective mode with a lesser amount of overlap? The reason for asking this specific question is that Photomerge Panorama in both Lr and Ps is designed to work with overlaps in the range of 15-40%, and there are no doubt case where a greater amount of overlap works fine. Nevertheless, getting on for 50% or more can be problematic for the blend algorithms.

[TrevorParker]

I've tried taking less photos (so that they're overlapping less) and am still not able to merge the entire scene. It allows me now to merge more than two photos, but the resulting image it produces seems to be the same two photos regardless of selecting the third. Maybe I can upload some screenshots.

[TrevorParker]

These are the 10 photos I'm trying to merge.

[TrevorParker]

This is the spherical perspective lightroom is able to produce. It is unable to produce perspective. You can see it cuts off the first 2 or 3 photos on the left hand side, and morphs the horizon. Photoshop does something similar in regards to morphing the horizon, but is able to include all 10 photos at least. Neither software is able to merge into a perspective photo.

[JP Hess]

What focal length setting are you using on this panorama?

[TrevorParker]

[TrevorParker]

Here are the images I am trying to merge. I used a tripod, though I didn't have a tripod head specifically for panoramas (that keeps the lens directly in one position, so panning altered the foreground slightly). These were taken with a wide angle tokina lens so the focal length was around 14.

[JP Hess · Accepted solution]

This is what I was able to come up with using the spherical panorama stitching in Lightroom:

In my opinion, the curvature and unevenness is probably due to the fact that you used such a wide angle. The 35mm equivalent according to the metadata is 17 mm, and from my experience that is quite wide for shooting panorama images. I have had good luck at 24 mm sometimes, better luck at 35mm (which is "normal" on my camera). I might be wrong, but when trying to shoot very wide it's difficult to get things to level out the way they should. At least that has been my experience.

[TrevorParker]

That seems like a reasonable explanation. I suppose at least I get a lesson learned from this experience. Bummer to miss out on the sunrise and rainbow shot, don't know if I'll get that again any time soon! Thanks for the help Jim.

[JP Hess]

Such a beautiful scene, though. It was a nice attempt. If you have the latest Photoshop, you could try straightening it out with the adaptive wide-angle filter. I made the mistake not long ago of trying to do a panorama with my 10 mm lens. Didn't work at all.

[Todd Shaner]

Another suggestion is to place the horizon line in the middle of the frame. This reduces parallax error and lens distortion effects on the very obvious straight-line horizon. You can correct the image using Puppet Warp in PS:

How to straighten Panorama in Photoshop wit Puppet warp - YouTube

[JP Hess]

Puppet warp is a feature that I was totally not aware of. I'm afraid I'm not much of a student of Photoshop. I just tried it on one of mine, and it's quite the tool! I think the OP could do quite a bit with it on his panorama. Thanks Todd, for the heads-up.

[JP Hess]

First of all, I want to stress that I am really not very good at Photoshop. I don't want to pretend or suggest that I am. But I took the image and used the puppet warp tool to see what I could do with it. I only played with it for a few minutes. This is what I was able to do. I'm sure a professional could do much better.

[TrevorParker]

Very nice! I'll give it a try, thanks for the help.

[JP Hess]

Screenshots would help, but the actual images would be preferable. However, they would have to be JPEG images unless you provide them via dropbox or similar. Are you using a tripod? I use a tripod. I don't have a special panorama head. I have been able to create panoramas using Lightroom from as many as 24 raw images. I have had very few complete failures. In fact, I don't think I have ever had any failures as much as disappointments due to poor management on my part.