Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS3: Stitching a Panorama
April 14th, 2008 | Published in Featured, Photography | 11 Comments
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.
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