Very low contrast after processing with PTGui

[Peter]

I'm a PTGui Pro user (version 11.31) and I recently used it to stich a huge panorama of a skyline.

My problem ist, that PTGui seems to lower the contrast of the result a lot. This is probably happening because it tries to match the brightness levels of each photo? I shot everything in manual of course, but the brightness changed just a little bit during the shoot.

This is a small part of the whole panorama. You can see the contrast is very low.

Here I put the original raw file on top for comparison:

Because of that I came up with those questions:

• Why does it lower the contrast and will I lose quality when I increase the contrast again later in photoshop?
• What are the best export settings to keep as much data from the raw files as possible? 
  

I used the following settings:

• Activated everything in exposure and color adjustment settings:
  
  
• Exported the panorama as Photoshop large (.psb) with the following options:
  
  

Thank you.

[John Houghton]

On Sunday, January 24, 2021 at 6:50:58 PM UTC Peter wrote:

I'm a PTGui Pro user (version 11.31) and I recently used it to stich a huge panorama of a skyline.

My problem ist, that PTGui seems to lower the contrast of the result a lot. This is probably happening because it tries to match the brightness levels of each photo? I shot everything in manual of course, but the brightness changed just a little bit during the shoot.

This is a small part of the whole panorama. You can see the contrast is very low.

Here I put the original raw file on top for comparison:

Peter, This is not a valid comparison (assuming you are inputting the raw images into PTGui).   You are comparing the outputs from two different raw converters, with who knows what conversion parameters.  It's generally best to convert the raw images to tiff in PS and input those to PTGui.  You can then do a proper test, particularly if you use sRGB images, which avoids colour management issues.  What you see in PTGui's Panorama Editor window should then match the generated panorama image, and you have some control over the appearance of the image in the Panorama Editor if you choose to make use of the Tone Mapping controls.  Of course, automatic exposure adjustments and vignetting correction will affect the general appearance of the image to some extent.  And HDR processing (if used) will have an effect too.

John