Best tools to stitch together photographs of a large mural

[El_Jeffe]

I'm shooting a couple of large murals that are in the hallway of a corporate client of mine. Because they're in hallways, I'm going to have to shoot them in sections then stitch it together in post. It's been a long time since I've had to do this, so I'm looking for suggestions for the best approach with all the new Photoshop and other tools avaiable.

My plan is to shoot on either Canon 5DIV or R5 with Canon 17mm tilt shift on tripod and simply move back and forth along the wall (and probably up and down as needed if the frame isn't tall enough) with two Proforo lights bounced or in Softliters to light the mural. 

Once I have the files, what would be the best workflow to stitch them together into a single image showing the entire mural?

I normally use Capture One for RAW conversions, but can also use Lightroom if that's easier, staying in the Adobe ecosystem for the RAW conversion. I assume I would then take the converted files into Photoshop to stitch them together. Would I just use Photomerge, or is there a better way to combine? I don't need the final image to be a megapixel file, so I can reduce the file sizes so the final is 40MB or so.

Thanks!

[D Fosse]

I think 17 mm sounds risky. The extreme wide angle wll cause a lot of corner stretching and distortion, and it might be difficult to stitch afterwards. If it doesn't work, go for 35 and shoot more frames.

In any case, since you don't have the option to step back and take at least a low resolution reference shot, this sounds like a difficult job. A low res reference can be upsampled and used as a base for the stitching, then discarded afterwards.

Make sure you have geometric correction turned on in the raw converter (whichever one you use).

I'd advise against Photomerge. It's too automated, too little control. Split it up into base components: stack them, auto-align, then finally auto-merge. For the same reason, I prefer to do it in Photoshop rather than Lightroom.

Here's an important consideration: the bottom layer in the stack is the reference that the others align to. So put a frame from the center there, work outwards.

[El_Jeffe]

Thanks for that. 

The 17 T/S is an architectural lens, so rectilinear. Agree, the edges still need to be well covered. I'm looking at an overlap of at least 50% per section I'm aiming for.

Good to know about the reference image. 

Thanks!

[Joseph Brown]

Have you tried Capture One itself to stitch. It would save on double handling.