Panorama stitching in LR5

I tried stitching together a panorama in LR5. I selected the files (8 RAW files), picked Photo --> Edit In --> Merge to Panorama in Photoshop, and... nothing.

I already had PS open. It just sat there. I could not find any indicator that anything was happening. I did a Google search, and found something where one guy said it usually took his computer 45 minutes to do this. It was late so I went to bed. Woke up about 7 hours later, and still nothing was happening. Task Manager didn't indicate anything, either. So I just closed out as if I hadn't tried to do anything at all.

Where did I go wrong?

Never tried stitching in LR, but ICE by Microsoft does a great job. It's free. ICE means Image Composite Editor.

photoguy6405 wrote in post #18515127
I tried stitching together a panorama in LR5. I selected the files (8 RAW files), picked Photo --> Edit In --> Merge to Panorama in Photoshop, and... nothing.

I already had PS open. It just sat there. I could not find any indicator that anything was happening. I did a Google search, and found something where one guy said it usually took his computer 45 minutes to do this. It was late so I went to bed. Woke up about 7 hours later, and still nothing was happening. Task Manager didn't indicate anything, either. So I just closed out as if I hadn't tried to do anything at all.

Where did I go wrong?

I don't know what happened there, but don't forget that you can dump the files to TIFF from LR then merge them manually in PS. That's the way I always used to do it; it made it easier to compare Photoshop's stitch attempt with Gigapano (and occasionally MS ICE) and go with the best stitcher for each shot (usually Gigapano, but not always).

Another vote for Microsoft ICE. Ive done a 45 raw image stitch with iCE and it took less than an minute. I dont have a mega custom built computer either. Just an off the shelf i5 with 16gb RAM. If your system took hours to do 3 images, something else is going on.

I always generat jpegs then open in PS6 where it's edit>automate>photomerge>select files>enter. Takes a couple of minutes depending on number and size of files

AS others have suggested you can open the images directly in Ps. As well as saving them out as a JPEG, TIFF, or PSD you can also open them directly from the RAW files. So what I would do is save out .xmp files for the images that you want to stitch, if you don't already auto generate .xmp files anyway. With the xmp files saved you will be able to do as suggested by bildeb0rg and open the images directly, although I thought the automate command was under File, not edit. At least it is in the latest CC version, I can't remember CS5 anymore. If you can directly open the CR2 files into Photomerge then you know that your Ps installation is OK, and you need to be looking at Lr for the problem with opening the images.

I don't see which version of Ps you are using, but if it isn't Ps CS6 or newer, then I don't think it will allow you to directly open CR2 files into the Photomerge tool. Lr uses ACR to render the image to RGB and open it in Ps. When you use an older version of Ps/ACR than you are using within Lr it cannot correctly render the images, and unfortunately Adobe just seems to let it fail without producing any error messages. The same happens if you just try to open the image to Ps too. When you do this normally though Lr will detect the mismatch in versions, and it then gives you the option to have Lr render the image instead. If you accept this, and tick the "do not notify me about this again" option, Lr will just carry on doing the same in the future. Having Lr do the rendering won't work for images sent to the Photomerge tool though.

Alan

GammyKnee wrote in post #18515219
I don't know what happened there, but don't forget that you can dump the files to TIFF from LR then merge them manually in PS. That's the way I always used to do it; it made it easier to compare Photoshop's stitch attempt with Gigapano (and occasionally MS ICE) and go with the best stitcher for each shot (usually Gigapano, but not always).

Actually, that's how I've always done it, too, but I figured I'd try something new since I had to do some post-processing in LR anyway.

BigAl007 wrote in post #18515621
AS others have suggested you can open the images directly in Ps. As well as saving them out as a JPEG, TIFF, or PSD you can also open them directly from the RAW files. So what I would do is save out .xmp files for the images that you want to stitch, if you don't already auto generate .xmp files anyway. With the xmp files saved you will be able to do as suggested by bildeb0rg and open the images directly, although I thought the automate command was under File, not edit. At least it is in the latest CC version, I can't remember CS5 anymore. If you can directly open the CR2 files into Photomerge then you know that your Ps installation is OK, and you need to be looking at Lr for the problem with opening the images.

I don't see which version of Ps you are using, but if it isn't Ps CS6 or newer, then I don't think it will allow you to directly open CR2 files into the Photomerge tool. Lr uses ACR to render the image to RGB and open it in Ps. When you use an older version of Ps/ACR than you are using within Lr it cannot correctly render the images, and unfortunately Adobe just seems to let it fail without producing any error messages. The same happens if you just try to open the image to Ps too. When you do this normally though Lr will detect the mismatch in versions, and it then gives you the option to have Lr render the image instead. If you accept this, and tick the "do not notify me about this again" option, Lr will just carry on doing the same in the future. Having Lr do the rendering won't work for images sent to the Photomerge tool though.

Alan

I have PS CS5.

photoguy6405 wrote in post #18515848
I have PS CS5.

If you are on CS5 then I'm pretty sure you won't be able to directly open RAW images from LR5 into the Photomerge tool.

Although Adobe released a version of ACR for CS5 that could work with PV2012 when they released Lr4, that stopped working correctly with the release of Lr4.3 IIRC.

You will need to render the images to an RGB format before you can send them to Ps. You could try an export preset that renders the files, then use the after export option to open Photomerge. That might work.

Alan