I’m finally getting up to speed with Photoshop CS3 and I’m really excited about the new Photomerge. The old one was ok, but the new one really rocks and does a great job of merging and blending multiple images shot in sequence. I just wish it integrated better with Lightroom.

Here is an example of what I’m talking about. It was a big weekend here in San Francisco and North Beach was hoping with Columbus Day celebrations. The Blue Angels were also in town and I took my two young daughters and climbed to the top of our roof to get a better view of the air show. I shot several vertically oriented three-frame sequences, starting with our roof, and ending with a shot of the Angels over the bay.

Importing the shots into Lightroom was, of course, no problem.

I really prefer Lightroom’s image editing environments over, say Adobe Bridge, and it was easy to pick the shots I wanted to stitch together. I selected the three shots, and then right/clicked on them to bring up the contextual menu. I choose Edit in Photoshop CS3, and in the resulting dialog box, selected what you see here.

The images opened in Photoshop and I selected File > Automate> Photomerge and choose Add Open File from the dialog box you see here. After hitting Ok, I waited as Photomerge did the job.

When Photomerge was finished stitching the three shots into one long vertical shot I cropped the edges, saved my work, and ended up with what you see below. Everything was fine up to this point. But now, because I saved the “new” panorama” in Photoshop, Lightroom had no record of it. I guess I could have just stopped there, and used Photoshop to print my work, but I really like the Lightroom Print module and I wanted to use it on the panorama. I had to go back to Lightroom and Import the panorama from my harddrive. Adobe says they are really serious about Photoshop/Lightroom integration. If that is true, then making things go smoother with Photomerge and Lightroom should be on the top of their list.