Best workflow for HDR panoramas: merge, stitch, and edit in what order?
Asked 5/12/2018
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I’m shooting bracketed RAW frames for panoramas and I’m unsure about the best workflow. Should I first color-correct one image in Lightroom and sync those settings across all the bracketed frames before merging/stitching, or should I export the HDR merges to TIFF, stitch them in PTGui, and then bring the panorama back into Lightroom for final editing?
My concern is that stitching first seems to give up the flexibility of RAW, but fully developing first can make grading harder when I’m only using one frame as a reference. I’m looking for a practical step-by-step workflow for when to stop treating files as RAW and when to do the main color correction.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
8y ago
2 Answers
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Regardless you will most often need to finish in Lightroom in order to get the final image perfectly cut to the right aspect-ratio and adjusted for the output medium, so it is best not to do unnecessary work before the stitch.
If you merged your HDR images correctly, you shouldn't really need the extra latitude of RAW again since you already had a bracketed sequence and therefore a combined higher precision. In any case merged RAW are not really RAW anymore and for stitching to work best, it is better to do the merge before stitching. I asked a related question years ago here and after hundreds of panoramas, the advice remains sounds.
Originally by user1620. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1620
8y ago
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A practical workflow is usually: merge HDR first, stitch second, finish in Lightroom last.
Why: once you’ve correctly merged each bracketed set, you already have the extra tonal latitude from the bracketed exposures. At that point, preserving “RAW flexibility” matters less, because merged HDR files are not truly original RAW files anyway. Also, stitching generally works best after the HDR merges are done.
Typical order:
- Capture bracketed RAW frames for each pano position.
- Merge each bracketed set into an HDR image.
- Stitch those HDR results into the panorama in PTGui or similar.
- Bring the stitched pano into Lightroom for final editing, cropping, aspect-ratio, and output-specific adjustments.
This avoids doing unnecessary work before the stitch, and you’ll usually still need Lightroom at the end for the final image refinement. In short: don’t worry too much about losing RAW after HDR merge; the merged HDR already contains the extended tonal information you were trying to preserve.
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