Julieanne Kost's Blog | Creating High Dynamic Range Panoramas in Lightroom Classic

In this video, you’ll see how easy it is to use photo blending in Lightroom Classic to stitch together a high dynamic range (HDR) panorama in Lightroom Classic where each of the panorama’s individual panels is made up of HDR images and du The assembled panorama contains all the quality and flexibility of a raw file (DNG).

If you’ve never created a panorama in Lightroom Classic before, this video (Creating Panoramas in Lightroom Classic) will help you get started. Most settings are available when merging with Panorama: projection method, boundary warp, edge fill, auto crop, auto settings, and stack creation.

Lens correction — Lens correction profiles are applied if Lightroom Classic can automatically detect which profiles to use. If Lightroom Classic fails to automatically detect the correct profile, an alert appears asking you to apply lens profile correction for best results. Lightroom Classic always removes chromatic aberration as part of blending.

Make improvements – I prefer to merge the images first, then make tone and color adjustments to the resulting panorama, because any adjustments made to individual images are not applied when merging with HDR Panorama. The parameters that are not applied include: main tone settings in the base panel (exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks as PhotoMerge uses its own calculations to expand the tonal range), tone curve, local corrections, eyes red, vertical transformations and Crop.

• To apply adjustments such as profiles, spot correction and color calibration, etc. can be applied when merging), make sure the adjustments are made to all images or that the image with the adjustments is the “most selected” image before choosing Photo Merge > HDR Panorama.

Ghost — The HDR Panorama command does not have the ability to deghost images. To use the Deghost feature, bracketed exposures must be merged independently using Photo Merge > HDR, then stitched together using Photo Merge > Panorama.

File name – Lightroom Classic saves the final HDR panorama with the suffix HDR-Pano (making them easy to find using the Text filter), And removes intermediate HDR images.

File size restrictions: There is a size limit of 65,000 pixels on the long side of a file or 512 MP, whichever comes first.

Offline files — If your original files aren’t available, Lightroom Classic will use Smart Previews to merge an HDR panorama.

Photo Merge Commands for Batch Processing

• To help automate the creation of HDR, Panorama and HDR-Panorama images, the Photo Merge command can merge several selected “stacks” of images at a time. First, select the images to stack (three bracketed exposures that need to be merged in HDR for example), and stack them using the shortcut Command + G (Mac) | Control + G (Win).

To speed up HDR image creation, three exposure stacks are selected before selecting Photo > PhotoMerge > HDR.

• When you have finished stacking groups of images, select the stacks that require the same merge operation and choose Photo > Photo Merger > HDR/Panorama/Panorama HDR.

• Each image stack will be merged using the selected merge operation. Note: The same merge operation will be performed on all stacks; so choose only the image stacks that need to be merged into panoramas. Or to HDR Or to HDR panoramas, not a mixture of different types of fusions.

• When multiple stacks are selected, Lightroom Classic uses the “previously used” blending settings.

• If a mix of stacked and non-stacked images is selected when choosing Photo Merge, the non-stacked images will be ignored (this can make it easier to select, for example, 20 “stacks” of HDR images in a folder). 5,000 images when you could just select all images and choose Photo Merge > HDR (only stacked images will be merged).

Merge different files – Photo Merge can merge images of different dimensions, focal lengths and orientations.

HDR Image Search – The easiest way to find all DHR images in a catalog/folder/collection is to use the Text filter (at the top of the Grid view) to filter for “HDR”.

However, if the file name has been changed and no longer contains the HDR suffix, in the Collections panel, create a smart collection and respect the following rules: