Totally! But I was busy eating and this had to wait 
- Donât worry about 16-, 24- and 32-bit. I tried 5 shots bracketed 2EV apart of a very high dynamic range scene and saw no difference between 16-bit and 32-bit, so I use 16-bit - itâs smaller.
2.a. If you still see âAuto Levelsâ, you need to update.
2.b. If you use â(Neutral)â then you shouldnât need to set any of those other things you mention to zero - the profile does that for you.
2.c. The rest sounds good.
2.d. The question is whether you get the best results by (a) first tweaking your photos and then stitching, or (b) setting your photos to neutral, stitching and then tweaking. I think it generally doesnât matter (I think = I tested many things and arrived at this conclusion). What does matter is that you donât lose any data before stitching. As such, when I process photos intended for being stitched into panoramas, I made a processing profile which uses things like chromatic aberration correction, a little sharpening, defringing, and other things particular to my lens, but when it comes to the exposure tools I leave everything as neutral as possible while preventing clipping in the shadows and highlights. Generally this means enabling âHighlight Reconstructionâ (even if I leave it at 0) and sometimes setting the Black slider to -5000 or so. Once stitched, I then make it look aesthetically pleasing, knowing I lost no data till that point.
I need to stress that you should absolutely not use tools like Color Toning or Wavelets before stitching, only after, because they will create differences between the tiles (I call them tiles, I mean the individual âshotsâ or âpanelsâ or âfields-of-viewâ or âbracketed setsâ which you stitch).
The rest sounds good.
Finally, once youâve preserved all data up to the point of stitching, donât forget to stop prioritizing that when you tweak the stitched panorama, because I-can-see-everything does not equate to what-a-nice-photo 