Which Is Best: Auto Crop or Boundary Warp?

When Lightroom/Camera Raw stitches a pano together, it will have to massage (for lack of a better term, or my just wanting to use a term that sounds somehow naughty) the images quite a bit to combine them into a single, seamless image. This usually leaves white gaps along the outside edges of your images that range from little gaps to really big ones, depending on the image. This is normal pano stuff, and that’s why you get two options for dealing with these gaps. One is called “Auto Crop,” and if you turn this one on, it just crops your image down on all sides, so you don’t see any white gaps. Unfortunately, this can sometimes crop off important stuff in your image (like the top of an arch, or the tip of a mountain, etc.), plus it usually makes your pano very skinny because of the tight crop. That’s why I prefer to use the miracle that is Boundary Warp instead. When they talk about “Photoshop magic” this is the type of stuff they’re talking about. Simply drag this slider to the right (I normally drag it all the way to the right, as seen here at the bottom) and watch how the pano repositions itself to somehow fill in all those gaps without you having to crop the image down at all. It truly is amazing, and it’s my preferred way of dealing with those gaps. Of course, this is just a preview window, so you can try both to see which one you like and go with the one that looks best for that particular image. But, my money is on you trying Boundary Warp, picking your jaw up off the floor, and then going with it.