Lightroom Panorama Update

This is quite a short blog this week to show a great improvement that has been introduced to the Adobe Lightroom panorama functionality. When Adobe launched its subscription service it promised regular updates. Whilst there was some scepticism, they have kept to their word and introduced some clever updates. In 2015, Adobe launched the Merge to Panorama functionality. A few years later it introduced the Boundary Wrap feature which made the job of creating a panorama easier. You can check out the blog from April 2018 where we showed how to create a Lightroom panorama. We’re now going to update the Lightroom part of creating a panorama with the new function added this month.

What’s new in Lightroom Panorama functionality

To recap, when we want to create a panorama in Lightroom, we select the images that have been taken by clicking on the first image and whilst holding down the shift key, click on the last. You then right-click and take the options Photo Merge > Panorama. (You can also simply press ctrl & M). The Panorama Merge Preview box will be displayed.

The merge process has done a great job of stitching together the photograph of Glencoe. However, there are some areas of the image at the top and bottom where there is white space. Prior to this update, we could either use the Boundary Wrap option – This stretches the image to fill the missing gaps. We could also use the Auto Crop functionality which simply crops the top and bottom to remove the white elements. The two screenshots below show the result of taking these two options.

The new function that has been added is Fill Edges and is circled in the first screenshot. This option does some clever stuff that we have seen in Photoshop and fills the white space using Content-Aware technology. This keeps the dimensions of the merged image as they were at the start of the process. It’s really impressive to see how it has dealt with the rocks in the foreground and the clouds at the top edge. You can move the slider either side to see the image with the white space and then filled using the new Lightroom feature.

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