Merge to Panorama
While this site is about Lightroom, I thought this article From the ACR Team: Merge to Panorama was worth pointing out as it combines in-house knowledge about the LR/ACR processes with thoughts about using the camera to take advantage of them.
You may have noticed something a little different about my panorama workflow in ACR compared to what you may have done with other stitching tools. I did all my editing, including choosing a raw camera profile, after stitching the panorama. The Merge features in ACR work their magic at a very early stage in our raw processing pipeline. This means two things: 1. The image created by the merge should be treated just like any other raw file as far as editing is concerned and 2. You can (and should) save your editing for the merged result. As a photographer, I love this order of operations because I much prefer making my edit decisions while viewing the final panorama and giving up the flexibility of a raw file is not something I want to do until I have to. Some of the edits you may have made on the original images are copied to the result, but only a couple are actually “baked in” and not editable after the merge.
One of those crucial “baked in” edits is dust spotting. I’d always try to correct dust spotting before merging because spots typically recur at the same place in each frame. Selecting all of the frames and using LR’s AutoSync mode, I can correct the spots on one frame and AutoSync automatically syncs the correction to the others. That’s a lot more efficient than leaving dust spot corrections until afterwards and correcting that same spot of dust on 5, 10, 15 or however many places it occurs.
Also see Julieanne Kost’s article Improvements to Content Aware Fill, Lens Blur, and more in Photoshop v21.1. It’s only a small detail, but I love the new Apply button in Content Aware Fill as it makes it so easy to keep each correction in its own layer.
And there’s an interesting Paul Trani video on sharing from Photoshop. I’ve always used Generate a lot, mainly for web design work, but the sharing of Photoshop Cloud Documents is new and could be handy. Maybe you never needed that feature and you will soon forget just how it works. But the key is simply to remember that xyz can be done. If you just remember that possibility and keep it somewhere in the back of your mind, on the day that you do suddenly see a need for it, figuring out how it works will be easy.