- In 2015, Adobe added the ability
to merge panoramic images inside of Lightroom.
Now, we'll explore that later, but the same functionality
is actually under the hood in Camera Raw.
If you're using Adobe Camera Raw,
with the newer version of Photoshop,
you could actually create the merge here.
However, it's not perfect, but I want to show it to you
because it's still quite useful.
With the images selected, we simply press Cmd + A
to grab them all, and then I can right-click
and choose Merge to Panorama.
This is going to analyze all of those images
and bring up a new dialogue.
Now, this is pretty RAM-intensive
so it's going to take a little while
depending upon the speed of your system,
but under the hood, it's looking at each of these images
and it's merging them into a panoramic image.
The engine will attempt to adjust
for any exposure differences and intelligently mask.
Let's give this a moment, now you'll get a preview.
You might notice some banding and an exclamation mark
but once it resolves the blending, that'll go away.
In this case, it believes that this is spherical.
Well, I was on a wide-angle lens, so technically,
that's correct although, I didn't shoot
the top and bottom of the sphere.
You could also experiment with cylindrical
if you'd like to see how it processes it that way.
I strongly recommend un-checking the auto-crop option.
In this case, Cylindrical is actually
a little more accurate because we didn't shoot
an entire floor.
Give it a second and it will blend.
There we go.
Ultimately, it's up to you.
You can use either version and evaluate the results.
When you're ready, click the Merge button,
and it will create a new file.
It's going to put it back in the same location by default
and let's just rename this,
Lincoln_Memorial-Pano,
and I'll click save.
You'll now notice that it's progressing
and you can track that progress down here
with the small progress bar icon over the thumbnail.
You can also see that down below,
and if you click on the hypertext,
you can see an update on what's happening.
Let's click OK and let that finish.
While that's finishing, I'm just going to get out of this
two-split view and just go to the single view.
Now, this is actually a DMG file, so if you take a look,
you still have all your raw adjustments.
Those adjustments I made earlier to clarity and exposure,
they're still applied to that image.
If we take a look over here at the HSL tab,
you'll see the same adjustments are still applied.
After the merge, it actually remains a raw file
and this gives you a lot of flexibility.
Now, if you want to move onto another task,
you can click Done, and this will finish
as a background operation.
When you click Done as well, all of the settings changes
that we made on these other images will be stored
as metadata with the files.
Let's choose Done, and we'll open up that image here
in just a moment.
You'll now see that everything updates,
and all of the changes you made in Adobe Camera Raw
are propagated across each thumbnail.
Now, this may take a second to update.
You could track the progress in the lower-left corner.
If you see the spinning icon, that indicates
that the changes or metadata is being synced,
and that the view is refreshing.
Once that's gone, they're up-to-date.
You'll notice that we don't have that panorama yet,
that'll be here in just a moment,
and we'll open it up and explore.
Here's that merge that completed inside
of Adobe Camera Raw.
I could open that back up into Camera Raw
to tweak it, and make any changes if I want.
This makes it easy to see what's going on
and when satisfied, down here, you can click
to control how it opens.
This allows you to resize on open
if you don't want to pull in the whole photo.
Otherwise, you can un-check that
and it's going to open up all 180 megapixels here.
After the panorama, that's a pretty large file.
Now, let's go ahead and downsize that
just a little bit so it's not so big.
I'll click OK, and I'll open up the image.
This is going to hand it off from Bridge in Camera Raw
into Photoshop.
It may take a few minutes to open up that very large file.
Now, one of the challenges with the Adobe Camera Raw
dialogue is that it doesn't give you as much flexibility
with controlling the scene point.
In this case, I want this edge of the image
to overlap to the other side.
Let's start with a basic crop.
We'll grab our crop tool and just crop a little bit
from the top and the bottom to avoid that scalloping.
Don't crop from the right or left edge, however.
Now, I want to see if the edges line up.
I could take advantage of a filter here
under the other menu called Offset.
This allows me to shift the image to the right.
You see, as I do that, it wraps around.
Well, it's really close.
This right here is the scene point.
So, let's click OK and zoom in to explore.
The Adobe Camera Raw dialogue did pretty well.
I can see a slight seam there
from the left edge to the right edge
and other than that, it actually worked.
With a small adjustment here, we just need to blend
these two sides.
This is where tools like the healing brush
are going to come in handy.
Option + Click, and then get a nice, big brush
and soften it out.
Just really gentle, and you can now paint over that seam
and let it blend.
What you're trying to do is remove the obvious scene point
in that image.
You'll just need to do that where the overlap occurs
by using a softer brush, and taking a few strokes,
you can get rid of that.
Remember to reset your sample point
particularly with the gradients in the horizon,
so you blend that in.
Sky looks good, got a little light here actually
from the bicycle rider
and of course, on this side of the panorama,
they weren't there.
It also looks like we might have
a repetition here of a person,
so we could take one of those people out.
Let's zoom in here, and we'll just put a small
transition on that spotlight.
We'll just blend a little bit of that out, that's good.
Let's zoom in here on this person, let's see,
yep, looks to be the same person,
that's a danger of panoramic.
We'll simply select that person, smaller brush,
grab him there, go a little bit bigger, there we go.
Click refine edge, and get a nice, good feather
with a little bit of an expand there
so it's a little bigger, click OK.
Now, we can use a tool like the patch tool.
This is here inside Spot Healing,
and we can now drag, choose some new pixels,
line that up and let go, and it takes it out of the blend.
Grab your clone stamp tool if needed,
Option + click and just fill in anything that's critical.
We took out the duplicate person, we've got a smooth blend
and that image is ready to go.