Correct Way to Shoot & Stitch Panos in Lightroom! (easy to get it wrong)

Good post, Mark

Another suggestion; The best way is often to leave “blank space” in the corners and then manual fill them out using the clone function. It would in this case be easy around the rock since it is just snow and the sky pretty plain and then you would not need to crop so thigh. By the way – its a fjord and not a lake in the picture!

Do you have any tips for getting foggy sunrise Panoramas to align properly? It refuses to auto align in Lightroom CC even though there are some “anchor“ points for lack of a better word. I will probably have to manually try to align them but trying to figure that out. Any help would be appreciated.

VERY helpful!!! The best PANO presentation I’ve come across for beginners such as myself in pano. Thank you, Mark! ❤

Excellent video Mark. I also shoot my panos in portrait orientation like the previous commentator. Never mind if you go long in your videos, it's always a pleasure to watch and listen to your expertise. Thank you for a great video. I really do appreciate that you explain the details in your videos, including all the options, as sometimes we might just get used to doing things a certain way and not realise that right in front of us is a button that makes our job so much easier, or improves the quality of our photo. I have learned a great deal from your videos because you put the effort into finding these details for your viewers :)

Has anyone used the AI in photoshop to fill in the areas of white in the Pano. Was wondering if it can be done and what kind of results they got?

Great effort and excellent video. You made it so simple to produce such a high quality image.

Liked the video and subscribed.

Brilliant walkthrough! I really don't enjoy the process LRC does pano. I almost always run that through PS. I feel it makes a lot more realistic outcome. But I'm reall feeling the help from doing pano's, like you demoed. Even just to expand the scene slightly on each side, without having to mount the wideangle lens. It's really fun also having the benefit of getting the extra Mpixels too.

There are so many comments already that maybe you won't see mine anymore, but here it is nonetheless: What about focusing? Do you switch to manual focus on the first shot and then keep focus constant? What about aperture and shutter speed, shouldn't at least aperture be constant also? Thank you!

Do I need a nodal rail?

Great tips . Thanks 👍👌🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧

Great video, very useful & informative, thank you. 👍

Do you think its effective to use bracketing on photos, stacking those and then stitching them together after? (of course within LR)

I learned an awful lot THERE - thanks

Panoramas are good for setting up a high resolution 20x20”, 10x8” or 12x8” images with the camera setup in portrait mode on the pano gimbal head. These images can be mounted as wall frames at a more reasonable pricing than super pano framing. The merge of each image nearly always will be perfect. The hardware is an effortless setup as well.

Pro landscape photog, also. The warping is to the inside surface of the object (cylinder/sphere) with you as the central observer looking outward. Instead of cropping, grab the perspective guides and bring the shot vertically correct. Better to use a shift lens in the field so the editing software isn’t creating pixels during warping or perspective correction. The pano head needs physical adjustment for parallax but less important for tele panos. Shooting more than 50% overlap can increase pano sharpness due to lens MFT sharpness drop off at lens edges. Even better to DX mode with FX cam to kill vignetting and sharpness loss. I use MF shift lenses which avoid these issues in FF shooting. For pano creation, PTGui Pro is 10x better than Adobe. For your snowy pano, I’d recommend shooting 5 vertical shots for more edit flex like bringing the houses vertical instead of leaning.

Great video! I haven't tried using boundary warp with auto-fill like that, I'll have to try it! I've run into this problem many times, where the part I want at the middle bottom is lower than the side photos. I end up either cropping out what I wanted on the bottom, trying to get content-aware fill to work (haven't tried the new photoshop beta generative fill on these), trying to get boundary warp to work, or I crop the photo so I get the middle bottom stuff, but now I've lost the pano. What I do now is I take three rows. The middle row is what I want in the pano. Then a row below that and a row above that. Now when I stitch them together, I don't have to drop out what I wanted in the bottom middle. I usually crop quite a bit because I didn't want all of that extra stuff above and below, but I don't have to do boundary warp, content-aware fill, etc. I now have a photo that has everything I want in it and can just crop out the rest. :)

Thanks mate, really enjoyed it! Time is not a matter as long as we learn something!👍🏼

You really need a nodal rail for the best quality. You won’t believe how much it improves your final photo. I have a rail setup with all the standard focal lengths marked. Lightroom can stitch in a third of the time. Lock the settings and just shoot. Editing is a pice of cake

Just a question... If I use boundary warp, does it make corners less sharp if it stretches them? Thx!

Wonderful mark it was really fantastic to learn from a master

Thanks Mark! This is a great technique I will add to my work flow as I am learning LRC!

I took a business trip to BC soon after getting my first DSLR. I brought my camera along and thought I'd take a few photos, time permitting. It was winter and I convinced the hotel staff to open the patio for me late in the day, where there was a gorgeous vista. I had experimented with a few panos in Lightroom, but this time around I took 15 (5x3) handheld photos, 24 megapixels each. Lightroom stitched them together wonderfully, and that was about 8 years ago. The final image after overlap and cropping was about 150 megapixels. The picture's nothing to write home about, but the process was very successful and impressive.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but from looking at the original photos, it seems setting the boundary warp near or at 100, is actually more realistic to what the original images looked like. It seems the lower number is warping the image more based on the shapes selected than what the real scene looks like?

Merci !

Just what I needed to learn. Thanks so much for an excellent tutorial that is straightforward and concise.

Really appreciate your videos. Just excellent and really has taught me a lot. Question on Pans. Do you prefer horizonal or vertical perspectives. I tend to gravitate toward vertical as you get MORE in the finished product. Your thoughts? Thanks.

Great video, thanks for sharing Mark. I haven’t tried panos before but will now give it a go 😊

What ball head are you using here, and do you like it? I’ve never seen one like it.

Which focal length is better if any? 50 mm?

Thanks!

Thanks for the video. Any reason why you didn't go with 6 photos for this? 2 rows of 3 shots...

That zoomed in shot is awesome .. like others have said, I do 2 shot vertical panos often due to the dumb IG Portrait thing

Great job Mark, but this video makes me feel SO justified in bringing my tilt-shift lenses with me. The hyper accurate panos they create are far superior to the ball head panos like these. The tilt-shift lenses also let you use PCL filters without the drawbacks others have pointed out.

Excellent video indeed. ❤❤

Fantastic video! This was really helpful. I've played around a little with spherical vs. cylindrical in the past, but I haven't actually shot that many panos. The "why you might shoot these" was also great insight.

I have wondered about / struggled with cropping panoramas. Do you typically crop for a certain aspect ratio? Or just crop creatively as needed by the image? And maybe what are some of the advantages / disadvantages?

what is the little pad that is on your desk?

Great educational video! Thanks!
I only miss one important issue. And that is that, i think, to have the shots you merge into one pano should all have the same lighting. So put your camera on manual mode.
Thanks again!👍

Great introduction video to PANO Mark. If you do another video in the future perhaps add a discussion on using a nodal rail for parallax error. Also a ball head with indexed stops helps keeps your picture spacing consistent.

I've been shooting panoramas and stitching in LrC since Adobe added the functionality. I'll often shoot big wide panos, covering 180° or more. I'll also make them multi row. My preference is shooting with a 100mm focal length, on an APS-C sized sensor. I tend to try to be between 70% and 50% overlap, both in the horizontal and vertical directions. I do now shoot almost all of my panos hand held. Finally I'll refocus with the centre AF point for each shot. Of course I take advantage of the HDR option, so usually shoot with three exposures for each "move". I can end up with a lot of frames this way though. I have some where LrC has combined around 180 frames. I have done a few sets where I've had to drop the number of frames that are being combined, by losing some of the edge, thanks to running into the pixel limit for image sizes.

Interesting! I have always used the prespective option for the landscape. I shall try the other two options from now on

Well done Mark, The video is a Beauty Mate... 🙃AU

What does the hdr merge option do?

Very helpful. Thank you. I have had a few messed up skies in a panorama by forgetting to take off the polarising filter!

There is actually an issue in that zoomed in pano, namely the sea in the bottom right. It's a typical issue I run into when doing panos that involve the sea or a lake, and LR and PS both have a lot of trouble stitching them together when the waves don't line up and there is no solid ground to connect the shots.

In order to avoid the "egg" view, I've tried to increase slightly the focal lenght in the extreme pictures. More or less: 18mm left, 15mm centre, 18mm right. I still haven't seen the pictures in the PC, but I'm eager to see the result of the experiment when I'm hack home!

Thanks for your tips. I never saw the slider among the options, it's really useful. Maybe it's not in my LR version. Greetings from Spain.

Excellent, Mark! Many thanks!