Lightroom Classic’s Photo Merge feature combines multiple images into panoramas or HDRs directly within your workflow. While the processing is handled automatically, understanding the options and workflow can significantly speed up your merging and produce better results.
Panorama Merging
To create a panorama in Lightroom:
- Select your panorama frames in the Library or Filmstrip
- Right-click and choose Photo Merge > Panorama (or press Ctrl/Cmd+M)
- Wait for the preview to generate
- Choose your projection method and options
- Click Merge
Projection Options:
- Spherical – Best for wide panoramas covering 180 degrees or more
- Cylindrical – Good for moderate panoramas, maintains vertical lines
- Perspective – Maintains straight lines, best for architectural subjects and narrower fields of view
Boundary Warp: Instead of cropping to remove the uneven edges from alignment, the Boundary Warp slider stretches the edges to fill the frame. Use conservatively to avoid obvious distortion, typically staying below 50%.
Auto Crop: Automatically crops to the largest rectangle without empty areas. Enable this for clean edges without manual cropping.
HDR Merging
To merge bracketed exposures into an HDR:
- Select your bracketed frames (typically 3-5 exposures)
- Right-click and choose Photo Merge > HDR (or press Ctrl/Cmd+H)
- Configure options in the preview dialog
- Click Merge
Auto Align: Enable this if your camera moved slightly between frames. Lightroom will align the exposures for clean merging.
Auto Settings: Applies automatic tone mapping to the merged result. This gives you a starting point for editing. You can always reset and edit manually.
Deghost: When objects moved between frames (people walking, branches swaying), ghosting artifacts appear. Deghost options (None, Low, Medium, High) tell Lightroom how aggressively to handle movement. Check “Show Deghost Overlay” to see which areas Lightroom identified as containing movement.
Speed Tips
Skip the preview: Hold Shift when selecting Photo Merge > Panorama or HDR to skip the preview dialog and merge immediately with default settings. This is called Headless Merge and significantly speeds up batch processing.
Batch merge multiple panoramas: Select all frames from multiple panorama sets, then use Photo Merge > Panorama. Lightroom will identify separate panorama groups based on capture time and merge them all at once.
Use Smart Previews: If you’re working with offline images using Smart Previews, Lightroom can still create panoramas and HDRs. The merge will process using the available Smart Preview data.
Let Lightroom work in background: After clicking Merge, you can continue editing other photos while Lightroom processes in the background. A progress indicator appears in the upper left.
HDR Panoramas
Lightroom can create HDR panoramas—combining multiple bracketed panorama sequences into a single high-dynamic-range panorama:
- Select all frames from your HDR panorama set (multiple bracketed exposures across multiple angles)
- Right-click and choose Photo Merge > HDR Panorama
- Lightroom first creates individual HDR images, then merges them into a panorama
This is ideal for landscape photography where you need both extended dynamic range (bright sky, dark foreground) and wide field of view.
The Output File
Lightroom saves merged files as DNG format with the original frames’ combined data. Key benefits:
- Full raw editing flexibility on the merged result
- HDR files contain extended highlight and shadow data you can push further than standard raws
- The merged DNG appears in your catalog alongside the source images
- Original frames remain untouched
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