HDR/Pano Play

Having been quite impressed with the way Lightroom quickly assembled my three image panorama taken with my tilt-shift lens, I decided to give the combined HDR/Panorama mode a try. I used a series of images I had taken at the Cathedral of Learning, with each of the images that make the panorama being taken as an HDR series given the extreme contrast that was present. The panorama consisted of three horizontal images stacked vertically (then cropped for aesthetics), with each horizontal image being composed of a Lightroom assembled five image HDR set.

I initially thought it did a good job, though the result out of Lightroom was fairly noisy. However, the noise was easily taken care of with Topaz DeNoise software.

Cathedral Of Learning. Final HDR/Panoramic image. © Howard Grill

However, on closer examination I did find some artifacts. For example , this is a 100% view of the upper right corner where the arches come together. You can clearly see that the bricks have areas where the image data is ‘smudged.’

By looking at one of the images from the HDR sequence of that row of the panorama, you can see that, as expected, this smudging wasn’t actually present. The color temperature of the photo is different from the finished image as it has not been individually processed, while the assembled image has been.

I am usually one that doesn’t worry too much about minor imperfections and lets the ‘feel’ of the image carry the day. But in this instance I think the result should be better. I am not sure exactly why the smudging exists, as the camera was on a tripod, eliminating any significant movement between images that might make the merge or HDR assembly difficult. Nonetheless, it still might be operator error in some way and I will need to investigate further. One idea is to assemble each HDR sequence into one image outside of Lightroom and see if the artifact exists using other software and, if not, attempt to merge the finished images into a panorama using Lightroom. This will need some further evaluation!

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