Panos from RAW

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing, Photo Technique

If you shoot RAW and take a sequence of images to be stitched into a panorama, you should do all of your color balancing and tweaking before you perform the stitch.  Once you perform the stitch, you can do some of the color balancing, but you lose the flexibility you have with the RAW format.  Earlier this week I took multiple shots of the sunset over the snow.  Below is that set of 8 images stitched together with no adjustment either before or after.

Now in Photoshop I’ve added various adjustments to try to push the colors to the saturation and hue that I saw that sunset.  But since I stitched before performing the adjustments I lost some of the light data so there are areas around the sun setting that are blown out that I can’t get back.

Here is the same panorama from the same set of images, but I performed all of the adjustments beforehand in Camera RAW and then stitched them together.  The result is a much more vibrant sunset and contrast that I couldn’t achieve the other way.

Later this week I’ll post a video showing how I achieved this look and what adjustments were done.  Then I’ll show you how to synchronize the images and get them ready to stitch.