Lightroom Panorama Merge

[Mike Farley]

This shot of Firle Beacon* and the surrounding area of Sussex is not going to win any prizes, but it provided a useful test of the new Panorama function introduced in Lightroom 6. It consists of 19 shots in portrait format which were taken on a Fuji X-Pro1 with the 18-55 lens extended to its maximum focal length. The advantage which Lightroom provides over other similar panorama merge tools is that it processes Raw files directly and produces a new Raw file which can then be processed in Lightroom. I did not have to use any other applications to produce the image.

How does Lightroom handle so many files? It was a mixed experience and my first attempt failed when Lightroom stopped responding. The 8 GB of RAM in my machine was quickly maxed out and I had to close all the other applications which were running before trying again. The Preview, which is not quite so hungry for RAM took 1:17 minutes and the actual merge was 4:06 minutes. Possibly the latter would have been quicker on a machine with more memory as mine was at its limit for most of the time, even though Lightroom was the only application which was open. CPU power was less of an issue and was rarely at 100%. At the conclusion, I had a new Raw file in DNG format with a file size of 428 MB. The image dimensions were 20,518 x 5,816 uncropped and 20,137 x 3,818 cropped.

Firle Beacon Panorama

Firle Beacon Panorama.jpg (135.64 KiB) Viewed 943 times

* The summit might not look that high, but climbing it earlier on had proved quite a challenge. My wife and I had approached it from Charleston Farmhouse, famous for its association with the Bloomsbury Group**, and the path goes more or less straight up. I suspect that the route from Firle, by which we descended and where this shot was taken, might be easier.

** The least said about what went on there, the better. The BBC has just concluded a three part dramatisation of the Bloomsbury Group called "Living in Squares", which seems to echo Dorothy Parker's remark that those concerned "lived in squares and loved in triangles".

[Rose]

Thanks for posting this Mike - I haven't tried the pano feature in LR yet but I can definitely see myself using this next year when the bluebells are out again. I've been using the pano function on my iPhone the last couple of years

[Mike Farley]

The obvious comparison to make is to see how quickly the image can be produced using Photoshop CC's merge function. Opening the files from Lightroom into Photoshop took around 2 minutes, something which was definitely CPU bound and a faster processor would probaly have completed the task more quickly. The merge step required around 2:30 minutes, but unlike Lightroom RAM ulitisation was less of an issue. Increasing the amount available to Photoshop only sped things up by 2 - 3 seconds and the RAM was never fully utilised. For much of the time Photoshop appeared to be using one of the four CPU cores more than the others, which suggests that processing is mainly single threaded.

Overall, Photoshop is slightly faster than Lightroom when the combined timings for the latter's preview and merge steps are taken into account. Results wise, there is probably little to distinguish the two, especially as the merged image can be processed using Photoshop CC's Camera Raw filter. My personal preference is for Lightroom as having a Raw file to process is more flexible than the Photoshop approach where changes are more permanent. True, the Camera Raw Filter can be opened in a new layer which leaves the original untouched, but that does depend on remembering to do it, not something I always do.

[davidb]

Up until recently I've been using a stand alone Panorama application (provided by Canon with it's photo development software). It usually took several attempts to get a decent final photograph.

Since the Panorama option has been available in Lightroom I've been pleased with the results I've obtained (usually at first attempt!). However, I've never done a 19-shot panorama (usually mine were only two, three or four images) so I look forward to when I do a more complex arrangement.

As usual, Mike, you're showing the way.

A series of shots taken at Whipsnade Zoo and processed with Canon's panorama software:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/44566609@ ... ed-public/

[Mike Farley]

Whilst 8 GB RAM is normally sufficient for much of what I do, I thought a bit extra could be useful and I have just upgraded to 16 GB. Rerunning this test, the panorama merge completed in 2:50 minutes, confirming my suspicion that the processing was more memory bound than CPU. It proved to be a good test of the new memory as the utilisation gradually built up and briefly peaked at 15.3 GB before dropping back to more normal levels just before completion. The timings to create the preview were unchanged, but that did not max out the memory when I had just 8 GB.