Lightroom Classic Panorama Merge : Boundary Warp vs Fill Edges vs Auto Crop
Today, Adobe released a new version of Lightroom Classic (v9) that has an addition to the panorama merge function: fill pixels (using content aware fill).
The new version of Photoshop (2020) also has this functionality but the images created in this post were created by Lightroom.
First, I did some basic edits to 16 raw files captured with a Nikon Z7 and Nikkor Z 24-70 f/4 S lens. Vertical orientation, hand held while on a hike at Chain Lakes in Washington State, USA. That’s Mount Shuksan in the distance. I loaded these images into the panorama module and it created this basic stitch (border added to see effect):
The resulting image is 26442 x 8257 pixels (218 megapixels), but it contains missing data around the perimeter (common issue when stitching). To correct for this, Lightroom gives you several options.
Auto Crop – this will create a rectangular crop of maximum size while removing all of the areas with missing information. 
26190 x 7282 (190 megapixels)
Boundary Warp – the image is stretched to fill the missing data. Pixels are moved and interpolated but the resulting image is larger than the cropped version.
26153 x 7946 (208 megapixels)
Fill Edges (new) – attempts to use Content Aware Fill to fill in the missing data (with limited success in this case, see below).
26442 x 8257 (218 megapixels)
So the new “Fill Edges” option created the largest file and preserved the pixels (no stretching) but also created odd artifacts in the file (as Content Aware Fill is known to do). See the lines in the 100% crop below from the edge of the frame. These are not present in the crop or boundary warp methods.
Detail
To make comparing some of the options a bit easier, here are some before/after sliders so you can more easily see the difference.
Original vs Boundary Warp
Original vs Fill Edges
Boundary Warp vs Fill Edges
I thought Boundary Warp might distort the image to the point that quality is degraded substantially but that doesn’t seem to be the case. After looking at both images side by side in Lightroom at 100% (1:1 view), especially at the edges where Boundary Warp has the greatest effect, I don’t see any major difference between the two techniques in terms of quality. So “Fill Edges” might work well for blue sky or other images where the edges are not detailed, but I’ll mostly stick to using Boundary Warp and Crop.
The final image (which I will edit further) is a combination of Boundary Warp (setting 40) and Auto Crop. This seems to give me the highest level of quality while preserving as much of the image size as possible.
100 Megapixel Nikon D800 Panorama from the Stawamus Chief
Today, I hiked to the top of the south peak of the Stawamus Chief, a popular hike near Squamish, BC. I took a lot of photos including the panorama below. The full size panorama is 22,383x4378 pixels (ok, not 100 megapixels but 98, close enough). Shot with a Nikon D800 and 24-70 f/2.8 lens. The variation of color in the sky is due to the use of a polarizing filter. It helps with contrast but because so much of the sky is visible the angle to the sun changes substantially in the shot from left to right.
First, a small version of the file, 2048 x 401 (0.82 megapixels, 641Kb)
If you want to see a slightly bigger version, here is a link to a 5000 x 978 (4.89 megapixels, 3.6MB) version of the file. It will open in a new window.
Open the larger file.
Finally, if you really want to download the huge 100 megapixel file (over 80MB) you can do so below. It is a zip file, I didn't want the file to open in the browser. Just download and unzip.
100 megapixel D800 panorama.
The PSD file that created the compressed jpg above is over 1GB in size and that is after I cropped a significant portion of the image from the top and bottom. There will be a lot more photos from this hike posted soon.
Fall in Vancouver
It was a beautiful fall day in Vancouver today. I decided to visit Queen Elizabeth Park to try and catch some fall colours.
