some observations on the new pano stitching feature in C1v22

...the trouble is that the information on how this feature actually works is rudimentary at best and as a consequence it's all a bit trial and error, which is quite frustrating at moments.
I am not talking about the basics of panorama stitching, like overlap, parallax, focus and exposure lock etc, but about how the developers of this feature have actually implemented it and what aspects might have an impact on the overall quality.
In particular I realized how much the availability of a proper lens profile is a prerequisite for the stitching to work properly, not so much the shading but the distortion information of the lens. If the lens profile exists in the lens correction tab, and distortion correction is set to 100, the resulting panorama is actually quite good and in many cases a lot better than what I was able to obtain in Lightroom. On the other hand if no info is available the final render will have a numerous stitching errors and ghosting. The "manufacturer profile" in the lens correction panel, works okay, but not as well as a proper profile. Also if you have transferred your files over from a Lightroom catalog and had them converted in Lightroom to DNG's the "manufacturers profile" no longer applies the proper lens distortion setting and you have to manually dial in a lens distortion using one of the "generic profiles" which doesn't work very well as the possible settings are way to coarse for this particular usage.
It's a shame really, because when it works it works really well, but it would be great to revamp the "generic profile" option in the lens correction panel to allow more fine tuned adjustments, or allow for some other way to build proper profiles for all the lenses that are not in the C1 catalog, because otherwise this pano stitching feature is a bit frustrating.

Some workflow optimizations would also be great, like the ability to build groups of all the images that are part of individual panoramas and then have C1 batch render them all, rather than having to do them one at a time, which for an application that prides itself of being a tool for professional photographers seems like an odd oversight.

That being said, some of the performance improvements under the hood of the C1v22 are pretty sweet and well worth the upgrade It's just a pity is just that you didn't really mention it anywhere so it sort of goes unnoticed with all the bashing you currently get for the pano and hdr features.
But I maintain that I believe this mostly to be a communication problem. So maybe you should schedule a proper webinar with the developers of these features and maybe David Grover to translate it into something we are able to understand, since he does such a good job at it.

Best
Ruppert

Permanently deleted user

December 11, 2021 12:13

That being said, some of the performance improvements under the hood of the C1v22 are pretty sweet and well worth the upgrade It's just a pity is just that you didn't really mention it anywhere so it sort of goes unnoticed with all the bashing you currently get for the pano and hdr features.

Hi Ruppert,

I would be interested in the performance improvements under the hood you observed, with respect to the 21.

Thanks.

December 11, 2021 12:43

...as a recent convert to C1 I had a lot of stitched DNG files from a Lightroom catalog as well as large number of "pixels shift" DNG's from an A7RIV that were impossible to edit in C1v22 since it took minutes to load a preview at 100% and it would reload every time I would go back and forth making it not usable. Now the whole experience is quite swift and pleasurable and even transferring my entire LR catalog of roughly 300,000 images took less than an hour (though the building of the preview files will take C1 still a couple of days, but with many of the files being 240megapixels and up, I wasn't expecting miracles).

December 11, 2021 12:45

...I meant to say "...impossible to edit in C1v21..."
evidently

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