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Creating Panoramas in Lightroom 2.0 Beta
First, my apologies for being a day late with this post. We’ve been doing some remodeling and I was hijacked into painting. I’d much rather be behind the camera or keyboard!
One of the new features I was happy to see in the Lightroom 2.0 beta was the additional integration with Photoshop - Merge to HDR, Merge to Panorama, Open as Smart Object, and Open as Layers. All of these options are exciting on their own, but the one that grabbed my attention is the Merge to Panorama since I seem to be doing quite a few of these lately.
To get started, select the images for your panorama and do any editing tasks that you have planned. For this panorama, I did some color correction and spot removal. Now make sure you have all images selected and right click on one of them. Choose Edit in Adobe Photoshop CS3 > Merge to Panorama.
It’s interesting to note that Lightroom 2 isn’t making copies of your images at this point. It’s working more like Adobe Camera Raw, opening the RAW images with your adjustments. Very logical when you consider that you’re creating a new document from the merged images, so there is really no reason to create new TIFFs before exporting.
After selecting the options for positioning the images, Photoshop chugs along for a bit to merge the images together. A little fine tuning of the positioning is often in order at this point. When completed, you can just save the new panorama and it will be added to your library.
Of course, this wouldn’t be quite so useful if the Adobe team hadn’t also increased the size limits on files - up to 30,000 pixels rather than the 10,000 pixel limit in Lightroom 1.x.
That’s it for this week. I’m back to painting.
Comments (2)
Super cool (nice shot by the way)
I'm loving how LR2 handles external files. Also that when you open in PS it does not duplicate the file unless you actually save it ion PS.
One thing that bothers me is that it stacks the new file with the orig, but does not give it the same rating like it did in LR1
Gav
Yes, this new, added "connectivity" between LR 2 and CS3 is great, but a small caveat here: the new features (for example the new local adjustments in LR 2) are something that Camera Raw does not understand at this point, so if you try to send any image(s) on which these new adjustments have been applied, you will get the error / warning message (see the screen capture at the end of my blog post here), and if you proceed, what appears in CS3 are your images without the adjustments. Let's hope Adobe will make an updated ACR available to CS3 users in the future, not just the new CS4 users... :)