If You Shoot Large Panos - Do You Shoot Raw?

I do only RAWs. It's much easier to do post process than jpeg and I like to keep control over the final results. It doesn't matter if I do pano or macro with focus stacking and dozens shots... The effect is important.

I would say that using Raws is even more important for big panos as they can quickly become more complex in terms of color and white balance management
If you don’t fix white balance on your camera (that I don’t recommend), then it means that you have to set same value for all your shots before stiching in order to facilitate color management within stitching software.
Doing that from Raw file is best of course.

I also combine stitching and HDR techniques for complex views. Then, Raw files usage becomes even more important and mandatory...

I’m using autopano giga (from Kolor) and it handles raw files.

I would shoot RAW since you can auto-sync in Lightroom.

But what do you do with such a photo? Even that 17 foot long puzzle only uses 65 photos stitched. 300 photos?

if your shooting a super huge thing, a jpg would make sense, you can still get data from it, but its smaller. a raw is huge and needs processing. but it really depends on what your shooting, your settings how much detail you want etc. your putting a lot of faith in having the settings right with a jpg. but raws are huge files. still i shoot it all in raw.

---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I shoot RAW just because if I'm shooting a huge area the difference in exposures can vary widely sometimes and if I don't nail it I can fix it easier later to make them match up.

Unless I'm shooting "snapshots", I always shoot in raw. Yes the files can be huge, but I don't like leaving the initial processing to the jpg converter in my camera.

I don't shoot any panos that big. Usually just 3 or 4 frames and always RAW. But for something that big .jpg might be the way to go.

The only rule of thumb to follow with panos is no CP filter.

I've shot panos up to about 30 frames. I almost always shoot raw, but if you take that many frames it might help. One problem with panos is that changing lighting, as clouds shade a portion of the landscape, and then the scene re-emerges into sunshine, is that this can become less than seamless. Shooting quickly helps. However, surely the indexing of your camera through the panorama takes far longer than any slightly longer time needed to save the larger RAW file to your memory card. So I would personally stick with RAW format. An indexing panoramic tripod head is most important for this kind of work, in my opinion. One problem I have is that when shooting large segments of the sky, there is often not enough detail for the software to align the stitched image in the portion that is the sky.

Here's a pano I shot that ended up with a 1:15 aspect ratio. It's a linear array, probably around 15 exposures stitched together.
There's a big watermark running through it. If you go up a level on my website you can see the whole thing in a 200px tall "Thumbnail", 3000 px wide, with no thumbnail.

http://www.gregscott.com/pano/20110503_1804_100_4813_gjs_new4.html


Stitching problems get more severe (particularly changes in light) when shooting a rectangular array. It's much more likely for light to change from one row to the next in a multi-row shot matrix.

I've never managed to stitch a spherical array. I suppose I need more specialized software to do that than Photoshop/Lightroom.

Raw must shoot Raw!

Like Heather said, when shooting wide panos, you will have to deal with significant difference in exposures. That's why Raw usage is preferable upon jpg and it will facilitate white balance management.
Large pano become complex in terms of exposure management pretty quickly
For complex views, you might have to combine with HDR and Raw usage becomes mandatory...

Here is a good example where you need to combine stitching and HDR. This view is coming from my "360 visions" collection
This image is coming from a full 360 pano... 69 stitched HDR shots - 7 levels bracketing... so 483 shots in total



I also published a quick tutorial introducing photo stitching best practices
http://fineartamerica.com/blogs/photo-stitching-quick-tutorial.html

Simple answer... of course.

Definitely shoot Raw, more information, more control of how it turns out. Save as Jpeg after editing.

Save the Raw, too in case you learn better editing techniques and want to go back and redo.