A Custom Approach to Panoramas with Lightroom

Introduction

Sometime back, while leading the Annual Photo Adventure Trip (ANPAT) 13th through Northern Arizona, I photographed the tiny ghost town of Chloride. One side of the ghost town is a long façade of storefronts that I thought would be a great subject for a panorama.

The street through the ghost town was very narrow, so I couldn’t get back far enough to shoot a typical panorama by rotating the camera from left to right from a fixed position. If I did try to shoot the pano using this method, it would have resulted in a funny-looking photograph with unwieldy perspective shifts. In that scenario, the ends of town would be very small while the middle of town would be too large.

To solve that problem, I decided to change my approach and physically walk down the length of town, taking images of the façade every 30 feet or so. I locked my camera settings like exposure, white balance, focus, and focal length, then proceeded to take photos from the tripod as I walked down the dirt road in front of the storefronts.

Back at the office, my plan was to composite these images together in software to create a long panorama, without perspective shift. Because of the atypical approach I used, I knew it was going to be difficult to stitch these images together with software.

To be honest, I’ve never tried to stitch those images because I didn’t think the Photoshop would do it. As time marched on, I forgot about the pics. But, fast-forward a few years to the present day where both Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC have new panorama stitching utilities. Just a few weeks ago, Lightroom CC and Adobe Camera Raw released a new utility called Boundary Warp that I figured might do a good job with this unique photo sequence.

I set about trying to get the panorama to merge in Lightroom CC and in Photoshop CC, but it was very difficult. To get something to work, it took me three different attempts and it required me to try a new method I had to make up on the spot. Here goes…

1st Attempt

My first attempt at merging the images from Lightroom CC was a complete fail. I selected all 14 individual files and right clicked to choose Photo Merge –>Panorama. The software churned away for a minute, then produced the error message shown below. I tried all three projection options, but each one resulted in the same error message.

It is clear that Lightroom CC doesn’t have the capability to merge images like these. I surmise this is because each photograph is taken from a different perspective. Each photo has different vanishing points on the buildings, roofs, posts, foregrounds, and sky. Asking a software program to figure it all out is a pretty tall order. But I wasn’t going to give up quite yet, so I decided to send the images directly to the Photoshop panorama merge utility.

2nd Attempt

Knowing that Photoshop generally does a better job of merging difficult panoramas, I decided to merge the files using the Photoshop Photo Merge utility. From Lightroom CC, I selected the images like before, then right clicked and chose Edit In –> Merge to Panorama in Photoshop. This takes all the individual files and activates the Photomerge dialog where you can choose the layout (projection) and a few other image details.

After clicking OK from the dialog, Photoshop spent about 10 minutes churning away on the images. Finally, Photoshop produced a slightly warped panorama, but it was able to stitch all the images together in the correct positions. Because it was using photos where each image was taken from a different position, the clouds in the sky ended up looking a bit funky with numerous repeating patterns. I could have cloned these out, but would have taken a lot of work. I figured I’d try one more method to see if I could get a final product I’d be proud of.

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