Taking panoramas is a great way to capture a landscape but what you might find happens is that when you stick the images together you’re left with a choice, Content Aware Fill empty pixels or Crop within the image and loose pixels. That all changed recently with the addition of Boundary Warp.

Making a Panorama In Lightroom

With your shots imported click on the first of the images that make up the panorama, then Shift + click on the last one to select a range of images.

Right click on any of the selected images and choose: Photomerge > Panorama

This opens a Merge Preview Dialogue Box , the same one produced by Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw.

In Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw

Select the images you’d like to combine by clicking on the first image and then Shift + Click on the last:

Open the images in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) by clicking on the icon shaped like an aperture at the top of the screen:

With all the images open in ACR choose Select All from the fly out menu:

Then, from the same menu choose Merge to Panorama:

This opens the Merge Preview box:

The Merge Preview Dialogue Box

Previously we might have needed to take images to Photoshop to complete the panorama but with recent updates we can complete the panorama here.

Most of the time the Spherical method of projection will be ideal, but there’s no harm in trying the other methods to see how they adapt the merge.

Auto Crop

Auto Crop will put a crop within the pixels of the image:

In this image you can see that I lose a lot of detail when its cropped, especially in the foreground:

Boundary Warp

This slider invokes ACR or Lightroom to intuitively warp out the panorama to the edges of the image, keeping as many pixels as possible.

To finalize the merge and to start editing the image, click Merge.

As always, a huge thanks to Eric for supplying this tutorial. Stay tuned for next week and in the meantime, check out more of his tutorials on his website, YouTube and you can find him on Facebook and Twitter should you wish to get in touch with him!