- Once you have all the HDR files merged,
it's pretty straightforward.
We just need to actually filter those out
so we only see the HDR images,
and then we can invoke the merge to panorama command.
This is pretty straightforward.
It's gonna look a lot like what you saw
when we were inside of Camera Raw,
and this will now merge a new panorama.
So what's kinda cool here
is it's actually combining both techniques.
It's taking the source images,
which happen to be RAW HDR files,
and then merging those together into a new RAW file,
which is the panorama.
Now that the HDR merge is completed,
you'll notice that the total number of images
in this collection is up to 54.
It took eight rotations to get the proper overlap,
with five brackets.
That would have been 40 images.
However, if you take a look down here,
I did a ninth rotation, just for safety,
to recapture the final position of that.
And you can did that there,
I recaptured the doorway,
just in case there was any major changes in the light.
Now, at the end of this row,
since I've adjusted my thumbnails to six across,
we can see the HDR images.
What I'd like to do is hide the others from this collection.
You'll notice in the lower right corner
that currently filters are off,
but if I click this pop-up list,
I could say only show me
Lightroom High Dynamic Range images.
And that will filter the view.
Now that I've set that to Lightroom HDRs,
you'll notice that I only see my HDR images.
Really it would take eight images to make this round,
and if we take a look at these,
they're already showing great dynamic range.
We're able to see out the windows,
and proper exposure for things like the fireplace.
Now what I wanna take a look at here
is combining all of these into a single panorama.
So let's select everything here so they're all active,
and then I'll simply choose Photo, Photo Merge, Panorama.
This is very similar to the previous dialog,
and it's going to take a look at these and align them.
Now, in this particular case,
it's either going to be Spherical or Cylindrical
depending on the field of view.
And I'm gonna go with Cylindrical for this type.
Give it a second to analyze the images,
and I'm gonna un-check Auto Crop.
There we go.
And you see that the right edge
wraps around to the left edge here.
We can see the flag on the wall,
as well as the edge of the chair.
Now if you wanna attempt to let Lightroom guess,
you could try the Auto Select Projection method,
and in this case it thought Spherical
was a better projection method.
So apparently the field of view is enough
that it feels like it's capturing most of the image.
You can always later on,
when publishing the interactive panorama,
decide to limit the tilting for top and bottom,
so let's go with what Lightroom recommends here
with the Spherical projection method.
Comparing the two, we can see
a little bit of additional distortion,
and I think Spherical actually may be a bit better.
Now Auto Crop would attempt to
remove the top and bottom edges,
but I get a little bit nervous that
sometimes it might pick up from the left and the right,
so I can either choose to fill that in manually,
or crop in Photoshop, which is what I'm gonna choose to do.
Now that I'm ready, I'll click the Merge button.
And this process can take a bit of time.
You can track the progress up here
by clicking on the status indicator,
and you could see the merging occur.
This may take a few minutes
depending upon the speed of your machine.
Let's let that finish.
Once the merge is complete,
you can double-click to open it,
and switch on over to the Develop mode.
Now, the RAW file can be developed like any other.
I recommend that you zoom in a little bit
so you can see things a bit better.
Click to zoom in on the photo.
And you'll notice that it loads at a lower initial quality.
It's a pretty large file,
so it takes a little bit of time to load in.
But check some of the areas
for things like noise and details.
Let's come on over here to the Details area,
and I'll adjust the Sharpening,
and a little bit of Noise Reduction.
Let's adjust our zoom with the View menu.
And find a good balance here for the Exposure.
I'm gonna take the overall exposure down just a little.
And let's lift those Shadows up.
And I'm just gonna actually
take a use of the Histogram here,
and pull those middle tones,
open 'em up just a little bit.
Grab my highlights, and play with recovering those
so that the outside holds together.
And let's lift those shadows slightly.
Remember, you can also come down here
and use the regular Tone sliders,
as well as use this as an opportunity
to re-white balance if needed.
I like the warmer white balance on this location.
It makes the house a little bit cheerier,
but I'm gonna play with the overall temperature slider
to balance that out, plus the Tint.
That looks good.
The highlights outside are working.
I could also paint over the individual windows
with the adjustment brush to finish that if needed.
And let's just bring the whites down just a little bit more.
Next, feel free to take advantage of Presence,
a little Clarity here,
and slight Vibrance to warm up the room.
Remember, you can take advantage of any other adjustment
inside of Lightroom here,
so if you prefer to make Tone adjustments, you can do so,
feeling free to adjust the highlights and the shadows
with the Tone Curve.
Let's pull down those highlights just a little bit.
And lift the mid-tones slightly.
Feel free to explore any of the other adjustments
as you see fit,
remembering that you can easily make changes
to the overall document.
If you have an area that needs an additional touch-up,
remember you can always select the adjustment brush,
and remember, you could paint in a separate Exposure.
In this case, let's just leave the Highlights alone,
and the Shadows at the base level.
Double-clicking will reset that.
But I'm gonna pop the Clarity slightly,
and de-saturate just a bit,
because as I darken, the Saturation will go up,
and I don't want the outside windows to be that vibrant.
Alright, that looks pretty good.
Let's adjust the Size of the brush here.
And no feathering.
And now as I paint, you see that I can separately pull down
the area outside the window.
Now you might find it useful to occasionally
adjust the size of your brush
so you can get into a smaller area.
Holding down the Shift key will also allow you
to draw straight lines
so that you can rough out the outside edge,
then get a bigger brush,
and just fill in the middle.
So you see there we've recovered the information
outside the front window.
Now this allows for some pretty cool adjustments.
And remember, after the fact,
you can still play with things.
So if I wanna de-saturate that just a little bit more,
and adjust the Exposure slightly
so it's a little bit darker.
There we go, that looks pretty good.
Now, holding down the Spacebar,
I get the hand tool and I can move over.
Same thing.
Adjust the size of the brush.
And you can rough out the windows.
Click, click.
Click.
And click.
And then take a larger brush,
and just fill that in.
Now if you get too far, you can hold down the Option key,
or the Alt key to erase.
And between these two things,
you should be able to get the results that you need.
Now, if you change your mind
or decide that one of those adjustments is not needed,
note this is pretty simple.
You can just click on the initial brush point.
You'll see that it's visible,
and now you can see the masking.
This can make it a little bit easier to spot problem areas,
or right-click, and you can delete all together.
Now I'm gonna leave that as is,
but the adjustment brush is one of the key benefits
of this all RAW workflow.
It allows you to take areas
that are just a little too hot still
and tone them down.
So if you see an area that needs a little bit of tweaking,
remember you can go in and selectively recover that.
Just be careful as you brush.
You wanna avoid hitting things like the windowsills.
So it may take some extra detail work
of adding and subtracting strokes.
Alright, let's just clear that out for now,
and we're gonna move on to Adobe Photoshop.
Now, this particular process of merging together
all of these RAW files,
and then merging them again to a large panorama
can be very taxing on your system.
My fan is definitely kicked on on this laptop.
If you have access to a work station or a tower,
you might need this.
This type of workflow can be too beefy for your computer,
and don't be surprised if it hangs up
or you have performance issues with the memory.
In this case, you can always go back
to a more traditional workflow
of developing the files and exporting those,
and then handing off from Lightroom
and taking it into Photoshop
where you just invoke Photoshop's photo merge command.
Speaking of Photoshop, let's hand this file off
and do a little touch-up.