Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS3: Stitching a Panorama
The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 beta is out in the wild, and some of the more powerful features in this application lie within the tight integration with its 300-pound older sibling, Photoshop CS3.
And the brilliance of this integration lie within the fact that Lightroom is able to leverage the power of Photoshop CS3 to do some of the more complex and niche “heavy-lifting” imaging tasks, while still providing seamless access to the powerful organizational features in Lightroom 2.
To demonstrate this, on my way back to San Jose from Sausalito, CA today I pulled over to snap a few photos of the Golden Gate Bridge. I only had my G9 “point-n-shoot” with me, and the lens wasn’t wide enough to capture the scene like I wanted … so I captured it in several chunks.
This tutorial demonstrates how to use Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS3 to merge those chunks into one seamless image. Check out a higher resolution of the image here.
UPDATE: You’ll need to be running Photoshop 10.0.1 (or later) for the Lightroom 2 integration to work.
Related posts:
- Photoshop Tutorial: Removing CrowdsI think it was one of the very first episodes of the TWiP podcast (This...
- Introducing Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the immediate availability of Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2 software,...
- Project: Photoshop LightroomIf you haven’t checked out the Project: Photoshop Lightroom site yet (and you’re a Lightroom...
- Lightroom 2: Hello World!I’m very happy to be apart of this evolution of Lightroom and digital photography. Version...
- The Golden Gate Bridge in HDRThanks to some inspiration from Trey Ratcliff after interviewing him for TWiP, and reading his...
April 14th, 2008 at 8:23 am (#)
Crazy magic again!
April 18th, 2008 at 2:26 am (#)
Great tutorial. Are these linked features only available if you have PS3 -E and LR2?
Cheers, Tim
April 18th, 2008 at 6:19 am (#)
Hey Frederick, this is strange. I have Lightroom 2.0 Beta installed with a clean new catalog with just 24 pictures in it (a 12 shot panorama with two exposures per shot). I also have Photoshop CS3 installed. I can chose Edit in Photoshop CS3, but all sub-options are disabled (Merge to HDR, Merge to Panorama, etc) even though I have several shots selected when I chose the options.
I tried this with RAW shots (.CR2) and with exported JPEGs as well. Neither worked. The same holds for selecting 2, 3, 5 or 10 shots. The options stay disabled. I also seem to have lost the possibility of stacking photos in Lightroom 2.0, because that setting is also disabled.
Is there something special you need to do to enable this functionality? I am on Leopard 10.5.2 if that helps.
Thanks for taking the time to do a video for us!
Regards,
Yves
April 18th, 2008 at 7:12 am (#)
@Yves
Yes, that’s why I asked the questions I did. I get the same greyed-out options. I have a feeling we may need CS3 Extended for this to work, hopefully The Man will respond with an answer.
Cheers, Tim.
April 18th, 2008 at 7:30 am (#)
@Tim, I see your point. I don’t think this is the case, because I am using CS3 Extended! I hope Frederick can shed some light on this as well.
April 20th, 2008 at 5:32 am (#)
Problem solved. After updating Photoshop CS3 to version 10.0.1 it works. Seems like I had my auto update turned off for some reason. Would be nice though if Lightroom would handle this situation a bit more gracefully or informative
April 20th, 2008 at 7:16 pm (#)
@TimB & @Yves,
Looks like you solved the mystery… As you’ve found out, you’ll need to running Photoshop CS3 10.0.1 (or later) for the Lightroom 2 integration to work. Hopefully we’ll make this a little more obvious when the app is officially released.
Let me know how things work out!
May 12th, 2008 at 10:57 am (#)
Hey this is awesome, thanks a lot Im gonna go try this out!
May 12th, 2008 at 9:18 pm (#)
Just a quick thing.
What is the best format to bring the pano back into LightRoom?
The few Panos I have tried have always put me back with a TIFF.
In the past I have always gone for PSD. Is there a quality difference between TIFF or PSD?
Thanks.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:29 pm (#)
Hey John,
In Lightroom’s preferences you can set the default external file format to either TIFF or PSD. Both are “lossless”, both support channels and layers. Photoshop of course additionally supports smart objects and adjustment layers as well.
So, since quality is not a question between PSD and TIFF, the choice becomes a bit subjective.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:42 pm (#)
Thank you sir.
Also, I have found that by zooming in a little when composing the shot, it can avoid a bit of the buldging that occurs with thoses objects closer to you (like the ground or stray trees).
Especially when shooting a beach or anything past the 160 degree mark, what should be a vast horizion (sea) gets mashed into a u shape while the ends of the beach get stretched our of proportion.
Example from the weekend: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2377/2488863680_c2f93ba56b_o_d.jpg
November 12th, 2008 at 3:44 am (#)
[...] a detailed explanation, check this video here. But really it is as simple [...]
April 20th, 2009 at 8:13 am (#)
Hi Frederick,
Just watched this vid because I’m new to lightroom and usually open my raw files from bridge then into photoshop. When I go from Bridge it works but when I go from LR the same raws refuse to create a pano. They load into PS3 but it tells me my images cannot be auto aligned. Do you know why it would be using a different script to bridge? Is it my camera raw version do you think?
Many thanks
Suzy
April 23rd, 2009 at 8:38 pm (#)
Fabulous – thanks!!!
August 25th, 2009 at 9:31 am (#)
Very nice tutorial. Sometimes when I stitch one of the 5 or 6 photos gets left out for manual insertion. When I do manually insert the exposure isn’t corrected, even as a finished panoramic (post-advance blending). Any tips to fix this?
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:12 pm (#)
Nice informative tutorial, but it didn’t work well at all for me. I have Lightroom 2.5 and CS3 v.10.0.1. I tried to do this with 8 sequential photos (as JPG) I took of the Columbia River Gorge here in Hood River, OR. I used a tripod and gave each photo about 1/3 overlap. I followed your instructions to the letter and yet I ended up half the photos (the first four) not showing up in the final at all. In CS3 I can see the first four layers completely black, yet the first two layers have Mount Hood prominently in them, which none of the other layers have. Any ideas? I could send you my photos to see for yourself.
February 19th, 2010 at 2:12 pm (#)
Hi !
I’ starting making panoramas and am looking for the “easiest” way to get good ones. I tried photosticht which leaves a lot of artifatcs, and tried today with your method. After some time (slow PC) I was astonished by the almost seamless panorama that was processed, considereing that I shot a large residential / urban area from a hilltop. Unfortunately, CS4 did a shitty job on the sky and the top of the pictures, where Photostich made a perfect job
.
I will try to play with the layers and the erase brush next time but I kinda suck at post processing… I downloaded a trial version of CS4 just to try that. I’m more into Lightroom.
Here is the pano, from 12 pictures, 1/3 overlap, M-mode, M-awb…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/skygge/4370613545/
Thanks for the video anyways, seems you got lucky with this shot in full auto !
February 19th, 2010 at 4:59 pm (#)
Hei, me again. Seems that prost processing reinforces/reveals the seams. I’ll try Lightrooming/batching the raws before Photoshopping/merging them.
March 20th, 2010 at 10:14 am (#)
Excellent tute. Thank you. Laser-focused and educational for any level.