

What a cool feature! It is one that I use a lot on my iPhone 6+ when I don't have my DSLR with me, but for this article I want to focus on comparing the post-processing software you use on a computer to get this same effect. The phone is actually taking multiple exposures and then stitching them all together for you without having to bring them on your computer.

Most current phones offer a feature where you hold your phone vertically, start taking a shot, and slowly move (called panning) across the scene in front of you. Smartphones have made this a much more common type of photography as well. No, panorama is taking a number of exposures, being careful to overlap them a good amount so that software can stitch them together into a single shot. I have to admit, I have done that very thing and called it a panorama – mainly because my composition was so bad I had to nix a huge portion of the shot and only had a tiny bit left. Very briefly, in case you are a beginner or have been living under a rock, panorama shooting and processing is not just cropping an image down so that it is much wider than it is high. Move to the next section if you could have written this one. Read on for my description of the Pano War where I put Lightroom CC (2016) up against Photoshop CC (2016) and a program most of you probably have never heard of before called Image Composition Editor (ICE) from Microsoft. I was super-excited to try out this new feature in Lightroom and see if would speed up my workflow there like it has for so many other post-processing needs. The part of panorama work I don't like much is waiting for the computer to finish thinking with every move I make. One of the biggest features of the latest release of Lightroom is faster native panorama stitching, something as mostly landscape photographer I do a lot of.
