Adobe Lightroom CC

[Jay Beckman]

With this release come two functions that we might find handy that previously needed plug-ins or Photoshop.
HDR and Panoramas.

HDR
This is a five-exposure bracket combined entirely in Lightroom CC.  The bonus is that the merged file gives you the exposure latitude from the blacks of your darkest frame to the highlights of your brightest frame.  Oh, and the best part, it's a .dng file so you have all the adjustment handles in Lightroom that you normally have for raw files.  It seems to go a good job aligning the images (this was hand held) and there is also a "De-Ghosting" function to eliminate or reduce elements in the merged file which may have moved from frame to frame.


Panorama
I fed this a 14-frame rip just to see how it would handle it and while LR needed some time to chew on this, frankly, I'm impressed.  I think mega-panos still will work better in Photoshop, but for those times when you need a wider FOV, you can easily combine two to four frames in a hurry.  It allows you to choose from three different "projections" and offers an "Auto Crop" function to eliminate those pesky empty areas around the edges.  The one thing it does NOT have is a "Rotate" function, so keep those horizons level!  Obviously, you can do further cropping and rotation in the Develop module.
Again, the merged image is a .dng allowing for all the normal Lightroom adjustments.


Both functions seamlessly add the finished file to your catalog placed beside the first frame of the set of images you used.

[Jay Beckman]

Citation X Interior .. Lightroom CC HDR Merge .. 20 Frames!

[Anna M. Wood]

These new features in Lightroom CC look fantastic.

Looking forward to trying them out.