One thing that I love to do is shoot panoramic images. I have an XPan Panoramic film camera and for digital I have a number of tripod attachments that allow me to shoot sequences of images for stitching. What I also do a lot of is shoot “informal panoramic sequences” where I hand hold the camera. I enjoy this but to be honest, I seldom get around to stitching these. I will go as far as grouping the images into a stack in Lightroom but then having to export them to Photoshop or Hugin in order to do the stitching is a little bit too much effort for me.
This is where the new stitching tool in Lightroom has taken me by surprise. I didn’t expect to like it very much but in fact I love it. All you need to do is select the images you want to merge and then chose “Photo Merge| Panorama…” from the Lightroom pop-up menu. This provides a dialog where you can select from one of 3 methods of merging the images or select the auto option. There is also an auto crop option to produce the finished image. Usually I am not a big fan of any tool that starts with the word “Auto” but these actually work very well.
The other surprise about the panorama stitching (besides the results being excellent quality) is that you can merge vertical image sequences as well as horizontal. By vertical I am not referring to the camera being held in the portrait format but shooting a sequence where you start at the bottom and move the camera upwards vertically. All this is done automatically before the resulting image file is created and saved into your Lightroom catalogue as a DNG file rather than as a TIFF or JPEG. The DNG format then gives you lots of flexibility to edit the image further.
This is a very well put together solution and for those who are interested I have posted a demonstration video on my Lenscraft website. If you are not already a member, do sign up as it’s completely free.
Now I need to find some HDR image sequences to try out the merge to HDR feature.
The Lightweight Photographer 
These updates are definitely a welcome feature in Lightroom and the DNG output is really amazing, allowing seamless post processing. On the other hand, panorama stitching is not working that well for me…It takes forever to render the stitched image and also lags my computer really bad, when i never had such problems with other panorama software. I also noticed that even though it does a great job with ghosting, when you have an image with many trees and branches that might have moved, then it doesn’t work that well. I will stay with PTGui for the moment, but i’m looking forward for the HDR and Panorama being updated and improved in next releases of Lightroom 🙂
Isn’t it strange that Adobe made a fuss about the speed improvements and you find it slow. I have noticed the first time it loads a RAW file it takes longer than subsequently. I haven’t really noticed the performance of the stitching software being poor but I do have a very high spec custom built computer. Hopefully the next release will improve things.
I might not have a high spec computer, it was a custom build as well but it’s certainly outdated now, Intel Quad-core at 3.0 Ghz, 8GB 1066mhz ram. Still i find the performance of the new Lightroom, inexplicably slow… Previous versions never lagged my computer at all. Now when i wait for the stitching of a panorama to finish, i cannot do any other task on my computer, it is rather annoying. I have faith though that next releases will polish the HDR and Panorama features 🙂
I tried merging both panoramas and HDR together and really wish Lightroom had had this feature long time ago when I was into panoramas and stuff…
Now that’s an interesting thought. This will make it much easier to manage all the files when shooting HDR Panoramas. I might need to give that a try.