Assembling an HDR panorama in Adobe Camera RAW

Putting together one photo with an extended dynamic range out of several was no easy task. But what if I want to make a panorama, with every single photo in HDR?? Seems like a pretty tough challenge in words. But it actually sounds a lot harder than it is done.

All about the Nikon Z7 mirrorless camera

The initial pair of frames for the central part of the panorama

Nikon Z7 + Nikkor Z 24-70 f/4 S, 24 mm f/13, ISO 64, 2.5 sec for highlights and 0.6 sec for the second

In this lesson I will assemble an HDR panorama of the ancient fortress of the now extinct state of Khorezm. Jampyk-Kala fortress is in Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan. Only the outer walls and citadel walls decorated with stepped ornament are left of the once great city. To get to the fortress, I had to drive two hours from Khiva. The main goal was to arrive a little early, have time to explore the fortress and take a quiet photo of the sunset. After sunset, the clouds that had been walking across the sky all day began to light up pink. Great luck for any landscape photographer.

Since the brightness of the sky was much higher than the brightness of the ruins, I had to shoot with bracketing. The overexposed shot got the fortress well, the underexposed one got the sky.

These days I keep shooting more and more so called “lazy” panoramas – panoramas of horizontal frames. The image sensors of modern cameras are so big that even a panorama shot with three horizontal frames instead of seven or eight vertical ones would have sufficient resolution to print in a huge format. And the hassle of stitching the panorama is much less – there are fewer seams, which is important when stitching panoramas with water and clouds. Smaller size is important for everybody since you need a powerful computer to assemble and process HRD panorama of ten pairs.

I shot this panorama on a Nikon Z7 with a Nikkor S 24-70 f/4 lens at 24mm. The camera is mounted on a tripod, the tripod legs are level, the tripod head is level. In such a situation you don’t need a panoramic head, because the foreground is relatively far away from the camera and the parallax is insignificant, almost imperceptible.

I ended up with three pairs of photos, one light and one dark for each of the three camera positions. Next, I sent all three frames to Adobe Camera RAW. I will show you how to stitch photos together in this program, since I am used to working in it. But the process of gluing and processing an HDR panorama in Lightroom will be similar, since the two programs have exactly the same engines in terms of processing.

Raw RAW files in Adobe Bridge

Before I start stitching the panorama, I have to answer a very popular question. Why bother at all to stitch an HDR panorama when you can understitch the photo and pull it all from a single RAW-file?. After all, the main thing is not to have a dip in the lights, and the shadows will stretch out anyway. It’s a good idea, but it has some serious drawbacks. The ratio of useful signal to noise in the shadows is always extremely disadvantageous.

And every time you pull information from highly underexposed areas, you get a very noisy picture in those very areas with flat tones, which will need a lot of processing – coloring, contrast enhancement. But the harder you pull it, the more noise will show up. So if you can make a few shots, you’d better take advantage of it – it’ll give you a much better and more voluminous picture. Which, however, is a bit more complicated.

Take your time with the processing here. Instead, select the first pair, then find the little layer button at the top of the list of loaded files. Press it and choose Merge to HDR in the popup menu.

Final panorama of the Jampuk-Kala fortress after the final processing