Adobe's new Lightroom helps photographers fill in panorama gaps - CNET

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Adobe Systems updated its Lightroom software on Wednesday so people stitching multiple photos into one panorama can preserve more of the scene.

Panoramic stitching is a popular way to tu a lot of smaller shots into a sweeping vista, handy for landscape photographers and others who want to offer an immersive view of a scene. But even with carefully photographed individual shots, Lightroom's stitching tool can trim off areas around the edge. Easing the constraint is a new feature called boundary warp that gently stretches the image to better frame it within a rectangle.

Boundary warp is only in the new Lightroom CC 2015.4, which Adobe offers for Creative Cloud subscribers. Lightroom 6.4, for those who bought a perpetual license, doesn't get the new feature, but it does get other improvements, including doubled panorama creation speed and supports for the raw photo formats from new cameras such as the Fujifilm X70 and XPro2, the Leica M typ 242, and the Sony a68.

Software has let photographers create panoramas for years, but San Jose, Califoia-based Adobe added the feature to its widely used Lightroom product only in 2015. Though Adobe was late, its panorama technology has two big advantages. First, Adobe panoramas preserve the editing flexibility photographers get when shooting with the raw photo format used by higher-end cameras. Second, they can be created and organized along with all a photographer's other shots within Lightroom's catalog.

Boundary warp makes room for better panoramas, but it also reflects a trend in digital photography. There's an ever greater distance between the original scene photographed and the actual shot a photographer shows off on Flickr or 500px, shares on Facebook or Instagram, or sells through Shutterstock or Adobe Stock.