Wait?! You Can Do HDR & Pano Merge on the iPad?

You should know by now that I'm one of Adobe's biggest fans, especially with Lightroom Desktop and Mobile. I still get amazed when I see the collection of photo management and editing tools that I have at my disposal on my iPhone and iPad. Still, there are some features in Lightroom Desktop that I would LOVE to access on my mobile devices, namely HDR and Pano Photo Merge.

I don't want to speculate too much about why we haven't seen those features yet. A part of me thinks it is a resource constraint, especially with older mobile devices. I know that some of Lightroom's newer features aren't available on older iPads. So perhaps that's why we haven't seen Photo Merge yet.

But when I recently stumbled onto Affinity Photo 2 for the iPad and saw that it has both HDR and Pano merge functionality (as well as focus stacking!), I began to consider whether it was a resource issue. I don't have those answers and won't speculate further. My ideal scenario would be to have these tools built into Lightroom.

However, as a photo educator, I want to provide you with any workflow I think would benefit you, even if it requires using a 3rd party app. And that's what this tutorial is all about. I'll show you how you can slot Affinity Photo 2 into your Lightroom Mobile (iPad) workflow to enable both HDR and Pano functionality.

Before we jump into the tutorial video, I want to point out that Affinity Photo 2 for the iPad is not free. At the time of writing this article, it costs $18.49 USD (one-time payment). I haven't explored the app nearly enough to tell you whether it'd be worth it for you. However, I use tone-mapping and pano stitching enough that it was worth the purchase for me.