Panorama Stitching Like Never Before!

Pretty awesome this Panorama Stitching extension.  The images below were made from very old pano shoots. Kilbourne Hole (a Maar volcano crater, 1.5 miles by 2.1 miles and over 400 feet deep, and part of Organ Mountains/Desert Peaks National Monument), below, dates back to my Nikon days, and consists of 5 landscape format images. Hand held if I'm not mistaken. Back in the day, I made the pano with Photoshop Elements. It did a passable job, but was no where near as streamlined as this Luminar Neo image. Simple as loading the 5 images into the app, select them all, drag them into the Panorama Stitch window, press "Start", wait 10 or 20 seconds, and you get a pano ready for cropping, saving, and editing (if needed).

I wouldn't be me if I didn't add miscellaneous bits and bobs to my images. It's only been 3 or 4 days, but I already forgot (without looking at the original images) if this was the original sky, or if I added it because I hate an empty sky.. I think I added it. I definitely added the Red-tailed hawk😆

Kilbourne Hole ©Daniel Gauss/Shot On Site

Back in 2015, we made two amazing sightseeing trips into Mexico led from The Pink Store in Palomas, just across the border. One of the stops was the Hacienda de San Diego, below, one of dozens built and owned by "The Rockefeller of Mexico", Don Luis Terraza whose ranch was so big (7 million acres!) that when asked by someone if his ranch was in Chihuahua, replied, "No... Chihuahua is in my ranch".

This is the simplest pano on this post. Simply 3 handheld, horizontal images, taken up close with a very wide angle lens, which accounts for the curved image. The "experts" will tell you not to use wide angle lenses for panoramas for this very reason. However, I like the way it turned out. Side note: the muted pastels come from using one of Luminar Neo's awesome presets, this one called: Travelogue.

Hacienda de San Diego, Chihuahua, Mexico ©Daniel Gauss/Shot On Site

Holy Warthogs! Did I do that?? 

In 2018, Photo Bro Dale and I hiked up from Mahoney Park on the west side of the Florida Mountains. I think it was to limber up for an upcoming hike near the Gila Cliff Dwellings that turned out to not be quite as strenuous as we'd feared. Anyway, we hit this notch that looked out on the great flat flood plain that is Lewis Flats.  I found a suitable location and took 3 portrait format images to stitch into a pano. Again, the the process was much smoother than the original Adobe effort. So much so that I had extra time to add in the A-10 Thunderbolt "Warthog", just for fun. (It came from the Photo Bro's trip to a local airshow last year.)

I had to replace the sky of necessity. The sky in the  third (right hand) image was totally blown out by the sun. There was no way to retrieve any detail. A problem? Sometimes, but not this time. New sky, problem solved.

Up The Floridas ©Daniel Gauss/Shot On Site

I should point out now, if I haven't already, that I'm using pre-release beta versions of the Panorama Stitch extension. Those first three images were made with the first beta version I received from Skylum. As I've said, they all were made without a single hiccup, from existing, older, photo sets.

It was time to test the extension with some photographic heavy lifting. It was also time, against my better judgement, to brave our 105°F temps and capture my view from the yard in panoramic fashion. I set up the tripod at the fence, put the camera (Fujifilm X-T2, in raw shooting mode) on the tripod in vertical (portrait) orientation, and working left to right, fired off 20 48Mb RAF raw images. (I did make one critical error, but more on that later).

Back in the office, I loaded the 20 images into Luminar Neo, dragged them to the Pano Stitch window, and pressed: "Start".  Since all my other images were just a few jpegs I figured it would take a little longer for the magic to happen this time. And it did.. around 5 minutes in fact. I cropped the edges, was happy with the result, and hit "Save".  The little wheel started turning, and the word "Processing" appeared.  And the wheel kept turning... and turning.  After about 15 minutes I decided to go in the house and have lunch. I came back about 45 minutes later and the wheel was still going round and round and Luminar Neo told me it was still "Processing". At that point, I bailed out of the program, and prepared my feedback to the developers. In my notes I told them I gave the extension a 4/5 rating because of the failure with the raw file pano save function.

A day later I heard from them, and they wanted to see the raw files so that they could diagnose the issue. I spent an entire day on two different machines and two different internet providers trying to upload an 800Mb zip file to Skylum. Without success. 

As luck would have it, the following day, I received an email with a link to an "improved and updated" Pano Stitching beta!  I loaded it up as fast as my rural internet (TWN Communications) could handle it.. about 180 minutes for a 1.8GB zip file.  As soon as I opened the new beta, I loaded up the same 20 raw files, stitched them up, cropped, and hit "save", and waited. And I didn't have to wait long! My saved panorama showed up in the Panorama Stitch folder in about 5 minutes! So glad I don't have to figure out how to upload those files after all. And my latest feedback to Skylum? 5/5

Floridas North End in 120° ©Daniel Gauss/Shot On Site

Now, about that little mistake I made. I shot the 20 pictures in aperture priority. With this many images I should have shot in full manual, so I had a few different  shutter speeds which caused portions of the final image to be darker, specifically about a quarter of the left side. Can you see it?  You can't, can you? Because of the incredible, intuitive nature of the Luminar Neo platform it took only a few tools to fix my lighting. And of course, even though the original image had some nice clouds in the sky, I had to use a replacement over the dark portion of the sky. A small price to pay. That final image above covers about 120° angle view. I like it.  (You can see a screen shot of the post crop, pre-save image at the very bottom of this post)

If you want to get your very own copy of Luminar Neo with all the great extensions, click HERE.

If you already own Luminar Neo, and want to pre-order the Panorama Stitch extension for $39 (It will be $49 on July 20), click HERE.

And guess what? If you're a current subscriber to Luminar Neo, you don't have to click anywhere. It's already included with your subscription! It will be available on the 20th.

Don't delay, get it today!  Oh wait! I'm not done yet. Once the official release happens, I'll have a post here showing what amazing things Panorama Stitch extension can do with video clips! Yes, I said video clips, holy moly!! I've seen samples, and they're just insane!

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