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Stitching and processing hight contrast RAW panoramas

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    Stitching and processing hight contrast RAW panoramas

    Hi,

    i'm trying to get to grips with my first photos in RAW, which I took because they were high contrast landscape scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows.
    It seems the simplest way in Digital Photo Professional is to use the highlights slider, and then the shadow slider, then save a jpegs for printing.

    However, some viewpoints I took several shots to stitch as panoramics and there doesn't seem to be a stitching facility in DPP for RAW, but there does in Image Browser EX, so I guess I can only stitch jpegs. I've stitched these into panoramas but then obviously can't process to improve the shadows and highlights separately in opposite directions (I can only change the brightness of the whole image). Presumably I'm trying to do something that's impossible?

    Is the only way to improve exposure on a panoramic to first process the shadows/highlights in each individual RAW file separately first, then to convert these to jpegs, and then to stitch my "improved" jpegs? My only concer with this is that I might not get all the shadows and highlights matching so the panorama stitch might be weird and obviously a stitch.

    #2
    Re: Stitching and processing hight contrast RAW panoramas

    The way I work is I process the raw files in Lightroom using the same parameters for all of them. This can mean experimenting with a couple of the images to make sure the parameters work okay. I then export the results as 16-bit TIFFs and work with those. I usually tend to concentrate on getting all the dynamic range I can in the TIFFs rather than the perfect look. Later I can tweak the 16-bit stitched TIFF in PhotoShop if necessary.

    Sorry I don't really use DPP, in Lightroom it's fairly easy. For example (you probably don't care about the detail, just the sort of things you can mess with) for my Covent Garden Panorama (which is linked in a thread a bit below this one) I shot it quite bright (which is atypical for me) and I used:
    Colour Temperature 6400
    Highlights 0
    Shadows +40
    Whites 0
    Blacks +50
    Clarity +10
    Vibrance +40
    Saturation 0
    Sharpening 25/1.0/25/0
    Luminance noise reduction 25/50/0
    Colour noise reduction 30/50/50
    Remove Chromatic Aberration: Yes
    Defringe 3/30-70/0/40-60
    ...and didn't change it in Photoshop.

    The St. Pancras pano, also in a thread somewhere below, was shot darker to help with shadow detail and processed with exactly the same parameters I just gave (which is unusual - I took them as a starting point for the Covent Garden one then liked them) but with five adjustment layers in Photoshop (Vibrance +12/-10, Colour Lookup="Feu_d_39_artifice.cube", Colour Lookup="warm midtones.look", Levels, Curves).

    I should probably give simpler examples... sorry.
    Last edited by DrJon; 17-10-2014, 18:51.

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      #3
      Re: Stitching and processing hight contrast RAW panoramas

      Microsoft's ICE (free) will take RAW images and stitch them BUT you don't have control of the RAW to jpg settings unfortunately.
      --
      Colin
      http://fotos-espana.com
      http://macameraclub.com
      http://turnspain.com

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        #4
        Re: Stitching and processing hight contrast RAW panoramas

        I process individual RAW files first (was in DPP now Lightroom), export as jpegs then stitch them.

        Getting the exposure balanced prior to stitching is key although some stitchers blend better than others and I've tried a few but my favourite, because it's the quickest, cheapest (free), blends well so is capable of good results, is Serif's PanoramaPlus Starter Edition.

        There is a paid for version (PanoramaPlus X4) that this post prompted me to buy as it was only £20 that I could get for £10 as an upgrade and brings the ability to import RAW files with .cr2 listed as one of them. Unfortunately our .cr2 files are seemingly incompatible and don't import meaning my workflow is back to: Lightroom, Panorama Plus, Lightroom.

        I suspect I can use TIFF files so will experiment to see if that produces better results.

        Which reminds me... a couple of years ago I experimented with a 30 day trial of a command line program (name escapes me but I'll see if I can identify it) that was very good indeed but it took ages to run and output enormous TIFF files - as in >140mb enormous. As good as it was I didn't buy at the end of the trial as I didn't think my hard drive would thank me

        Cheers,
        John

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