Digital Camera World - UK (2019-12)

74 DIGITAL CAMERA^ DECEMBER 2019 http://www.digitalcameraworld.com

Create hyper-detailed

HDR panoramas

Master this powerful merge command

in Camera Raw or Lightroom and stitch

bracketed photos together with ease

Resolution

and bit depth

Panoramas are limited in size to

65,000 pixels along the long side,

or 512 megapixels (whichever comes

first). This is plenty for most uses,

but if you want to build hyper-

detailed giga-panos from dozens

of photos, you’ll need to use other

stitching software like PTGui. Upon

merging, Camera Raw/Lightroom

produces a 16-bit HDR Panorama in

the Adobe DNG format. If you prefer

to create a 32-bit HDR with greater

colour depth, use Photoshop’s Merge

to HDR feature (pictured). You’d first

need to create separate panoramas

for each stop interval in the set, then

merge the bracketed panoramas to

a 32-bit HDR image.

James

Paterson

With a decade as a writer

and photographer behind

him, James knows exactly

which Photoshop and

Lightroom tools and

techniques matter most.

DR and Panorama Merge features have

been available in Camera Raw/Lightroom

for a while, but recently a third merge

option has been introduced that handily

does both functions at once. The HDR

Panorama feature allows you to merge a set of exposures

into a detail-rich panorama in just a few easy steps. It

does this by combining a set of bracketed exposures

into an HDR image, one for each segment of the

panorama, then stitches these HDR segments together.

You’ll need a carefully captured set of images to

feed into the feature. We’ve supplied a sample set

to experiment with on the disc, but if you intend to

shoot your own, use your camera’s bracketing feature.

We took three frames for each segment of the

panorama at one-stop intervals – enough to capture

optimum detail in both the brightest and darkest parts

of the sunny scene. These segments were each shot

vertically from right to left with a healthy overlap between

them, and there are six in total. With three bracketed

frames for each segment, altogether this makes

a set of 18 frames. You can bring them all together

with ease using the HDR Panorama command.

H

TOOL SCHOOL

FILE & VIDEO

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disc: http://www.bit.ly/

dc223disc

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