Hi all! Can someone advise how best to organize the workflow. I have a fairly large archive of old negative films and slides, including medium format panoramas 6X9, 6X12, 6X18. I encountered the inconvenience of processing such panoramas in Lightroom (I have never worked in Lightroom before, maybe that’s why), I usually stitch them together in Adobe Camera Raw and everything is familiar and familiar there. Is it possible to edit the resulting panorama (RAW, DNG) in ACR after processing with the plugin and stitching in Lightroom?
As far as I know. if you are using Negative Lab Pro (NLP), it is not configured for ACR, but it is for Lightroom, notwithstanding that the develop algorithms in both Adobe applications are the same. But in any case, having worked extensively with photo-merges of scanned film, NLP doesn’t enter my workflow until AFTER the stitching work is completed. This is because I have observed that Photo-merge in Lightroom (and likely the same in ACR) ignores everything done to a file after import and reverts to the original totally unedited import as its source material for creating the merge.
So my specific procedure for panoramas (or any photo merge) is as follows:
(1) make the photographs of the film images to be merged.
(2) open those files in LR and apply photo-merge. It will work well if the photos being merged are capable of being merged. The Photo-merge tool only works properly if the perspectives in the images align pretty well and there is about 25% overlap between images on each side. So you need to pay attention at the time you photograph the negatives that these conditions will be respected.
(3) If the resulting merge needs some straightening and cropping, use the LR Upright and Crop tools to do that.(When photographing negatives that are already panoramas, this step will probably not be necessary.)
(4) We are still in the negative image mode. So open the merged and straightened negative image in NLP and from there continue working it in the usual way.
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I am very grateful to you for your valuable advice, now the workflow is clearer. For the resulting panorama, I’m using several vertical stitched shots taken with a Sony a7R IV and a Voigtlander MACRO APO-LANTHAR 110mm f/2.5, and am now trying to figure out the workflow to get the best quality. Well, I will study Lightroom, although now, it seems to me that the ACR is more intuitive and easier to edit. I wonder if NLP can be implemented in the ACR?
Sincerely
Unfortunately, ACR does not have the ability to integrate plugins, so it is not possible.
And just to add on to everything @Mark_Segal has said above, I completely agree with his approach. The one exception may be that if you find a particular photo is not merging well even though you have set everything up properly, there is another workflow that can work in a pinch.
Workflow for images that aren’t merging well:
- Convert one of the images in your multi-part capture, adjust as best you can in NLP to make the scene neutral, then use the “sync scene” function in Negative Lab Pro to bring over the exact same conversion over to the other shots of the same negative
- Export all the shots to TIFF, and open in Photoshop
- From here you can try Photoshop’s photomerge, which I find typically works a bit better. There are a few more options (like “Reposition”) that seem to better match up to the needs of this type of stitching (Lightroom’s seems more gears towards panoramas).
- If that doesn’t work, you can go one step further and try the “auto-blend layers” feature in Photoshop. You can add and position your images one by one and use “Auto-Blend” to line up and perfectly transition the layers. It’s a bit of work and you wouldn’t want to have to do this on every photo, but it is a lifesaver for really difficult merges (for instance, merges of images with lots of open space in them).
Hope that helps!
-Nate
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Thank you so much! I got a lot of valuable advice and it’s time to try, make mistakes and experiment again.
I am very grateful for the invaluable help.