I am getting more and more interested in shooting in a panoramic format for my landscape photography. The ratio lends itself to the way I see my surroundings and I am really liking the results so far. Lately however I have started running into some problems while stitching and editing my photos. I noticed on the photo below that I had lost a ton of data in the shaded areas and started looking at other images I've stitched and noticed the same thing. When I edit the original pieces in Lightroom prior to stitching I am able to recover a ton of detail from shaded areas. When I stitch before editing however these shades turn into a solid black that is almost impossible to recover. I use photomerge in PS to stitch and export to an 8 bit Tiff file. My original raw images are 14 bit files and however. How can I ensure a lossless stitch in PS? Or should i be editing prior to stitching?
That's a really good question, and one I actually have as well; I haven't found a good solution for it yet either, so I'm hoping I can learn as well!
This could also be a setting in your preferences that is mismatched that cause your images to darken. Check that your LR Prefs "External Editing" is set to the same settings "Colour / Working spaces" in your PS.