Lightroom Mag June-July

Lightroom Magazine
Filling the Edges
The Fill Edges option in the Panorama Merge Preview
dialog is a fairly new addition to Lightroom and Camera
Raw. As I’ve shown in the previous steps, it can be
used to auto-fill the transparent outer areas of a
panorama using the same technology that powers the
Content-Aware Fill feature in Photoshop. Essentially, you
now have two methods for expanding a panorama
beyond the limits of the initial photo merge.
When working with the Panorama Merge Preview
dialog, you can use the Boundary Warp slider to force it
to fill the outer edges of the image. This can often be
effective at expanding the edges so that you don’t have
to crop the merged panorama image so tightly. With the
addition of the Fill Edges option, you can choose to
select this instead, or apply a combination of the two.
ALL IMAGES BY MARTIN EVENING
Fill Edges can work well, as long as you don’t have
gaps that are too big to fill. Its effectiveness is also
dependent on the image content closest to the borders.
With architectural subjects or scenes with a lot of busy
detail, you can’t expect this feature to work as well as
when simply filling an empty sky area.
It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve worked on a woodland
landscape image, filled the outer areas using the
Content-Aware Fill method, and then only realized after
making a print that my photo had branches floating
freely in mid-air! The examples here show how effective
Fill Edges can be with a landscape image where there’s a
large area of clear blue sky to fill. n
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LIGHTROOM MAGAZINE › ISSUE 62
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