Big Timesaver For Making Panoramas Starting in Lightroom

Hi everybody! Greetings from Dubai! 🙂

If you shoot and stitch multi-photo panoramas (jumping from Lightroom over to Photoshop to use the Photomerge feature), you know that once you click OK in the Merge to Panorama feature, it can take take quite a while for the stitched together pano to appear — I’m talking even 5 or 10 minutes depending on how many images are in your pano and how fast (or slow) your computer is. What’s worse is, what happens if you wait all that time and when the images appears, even though Photoshop stitched it perfectly, you simply just don’t like it. Yup, it’s a pano, but you think it’s a boring one? You waited all that time for…well…nothing. You just hit delete and don’t save, right? Well, here’s a what to see the results much quicker so you don’t waste a bunch of time.

Step One: Select the images in Lightroom you want to have Photoshop Stitch into a Panorama.

Step Two: Go to Export and chose the “For E-mail (Hard Drive)” export preset and export these images. The For E-Mail (Hard Drive) preset gives you small sized, low quality JPEGs and once exported, we’ll open them in Photoshop, and then go under the File Menu; under Automate, and choose Photomerge and that pano will appear in seconds instead of 5 to 10 minutes. When the image appears (think of it as a low-res preview) if you don’t like the pano, just close it and click don’t save — you’ve only lost a minute or so.

If however, you like what you see in the low res preview pano, and now it’s worth the wait for the high res version, then you can go back to Lightroom; go under the Photo menu, under Edit In, and there choose Merge to Panorama to send those high-resolution images over to Photoshop to create a high resolution version of your pano.

Hope you find that helpful (I use this one all the time and it really pays off in time saved).

Have a great Monday everybody, and I hope to see you back here tomorrow.

Best,

-Scott