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Drone panorama examples

We've get used to shooting panoramas with user-friendly preset modes on our phones and cameras, but the unique perspective from a drone adds a vertical dimension that can create some impressive bird'due south-centre views. However, this likewise complicates the process of capturing, processing, and sharing images. We'll walk y'all through how to practice it and the tools yous'll need. For illustration we'll use my favorite DJI Mavic Pro, simply the process is very like for other prosumer drones.

Capturing 360-degree Panoramas with your Drone

For starters, you'll want to optimize your drone'southward camera settings. Apply every bit depression an ISO as you can that still allows y'all enough shutter speed to reduce or eliminate motion mistiness from the scene. For landscapes I've constitute speeds equally low as 1/60 of a second work fine. If you are shooting in brilliant light, information technology is too worth seeing if adding a Round Polarizing filter similar those from PolarPro gives yous an improved look (a CPL will filter out a lot of reflected light, and will often warm up an image shot nether bright light atmospheric condition). I use PolarPro filters considering they are low-cal enough not to harm the drone's gimbal, but nonetheless pretty rugged.

This 360-degree panorama of Cerise Rock Canyon was shot using a Mavic Pro, Litchi flight app, and the workflow described in this article (click to navigate):

Simply as smartphones have added Panorama modes, drone makers have been adding automatic 360-caste Panorama modes. DJI, for example, has added a 1-click Panorama selection to the latest versions of its DJI Go application. The new fashion allows your supported drone to take a pre-defined series of shots and stitches them for you. If you want a quick way to get a reasonable capture, this is ideal. It has four modes, with Sphere existence the one to utilise to create a 360-caste image. Sphere mode captures 34 images and automatically stitches them for you lot into a composite JPEG.

As with most any photography, you can get the best quality from your drone'due south camera by shooting in RAW mode. For the Mavic Pro, that means 12MP DNG files. Ane absurd play a joke on with DJI's Pano way is that if you lot set your camera to RAW earlier using it, you'll get both a stitched JPEG and all the initial RAW files that you can process yourself after.

Setting your Exposure is probably the trickiest part of setting upwards your camera. Ideally for shooting a panorama y'all want to option a single exposure that will cover the of import elements of the entire scene and then lock it in using Manual. Yet, with the limited dynamic range of prosumer drone cameras, there often isn't a unmarried Exposure setting that will work in all directions. In that case I've had surprisingly skillful success leaving the Exposure on Auto and letting the post-processing software deal with stitching. Y'all tin can also set the drone's camera to bracket, and take several images from each position. That gives you the best possible paradigm data to work with, merely of course takes much longer to do and process.

Flying your Drone to Capture the Panorama

If y'all're non using a built-in Panorama mode, y'all have a couple options for flying your drone. The first is to manually  fly it. Starting time at the Horizon (if there are interesting clouds or mountains, and then you may desire to start aimed even higher), and capture images at intervals around a full circumvolve. For all-time results you desire around a 50% overlap between images. For the Mavic Pro that means about a dozen images around the horizon. Then move your gimbal downward virtually i/2 of a frame top, and repeat. Do this until you are looking straight down, and then have a couple images while rotating around that point (referred to as the nadir). Then you're all set!

This panorama of the Shan Country countryside in Myanmar was not only fun to capture, but generated a lot of curiosity amid the locals. One farmer offered to trade united states his crop of chili peppers for my Mavic Pro (click to navigate):

If y'all want to have the drone do information technology for you (I dearest having my drone get a view of the surroundings while I stop and swallow my lunch while traveling, for example), then you tin utilize an app that supports programmed Panoramas. My favorite is Litchi, which is available for both Android and iOS. It isn't gratuitous, just it doesn't have long for it to pay for itself. Within Litchi you can set where you desire to start, how many images y'all want on each row, and how many rows yous want to capture. You can even put a delay between shots if you're otherwise pushing the performance of your drone or mobile device as well hard.

Post-processing your Drone Images

If you've shot RAW, you'll demand to procedure the images every bit a batch before y'all tin run up them. I've found Camera Raw in Photoshop or Lightroom a convenient way to do that. Typically you'll want to utilize the same settings for all the images, to provide a consistent look. For maximum quality, relieve the results out equally TIFF files, if your stitching software supports that; otherwise as JPEGs.

Stitching a panorama couldn't be any simpler than Microsoft's ICE makes it

Stitching a panorama couldn't be any simpler than Microsoft'due south Water ice makes information technology

Quality stitching is the most-demanding part of the post-processing workflow. Fortunately, there are several really good tools available. One of the almost impressive for its powerful simplicity is ICE (Image Composite Editor) from Microsoft Inquiry. Yous tin can nearly always just throw your images at it and it will practise a great job of organizing and stitching them. Unfortunately, the software doesn't add all the metadata needed to correctly display in some sharing sites, and Microsoft has abased it, so if you lot use information technology you'll probably need to add together some metadata on your own.

You tin can add your own metadata, merely the procedure is a scrap painful. Facebook provides some guidance, but it isn't a specially user-friendly set of guidelines. All in all, you're probably improve off working with a current application that has automated back up for the needed tags. I've too stopped cropping my panoramas, as information technology makes the metadata more than complex, and the only downside is some black surface area (or perchance artificially filled in bluish area) in a higher place the horizon.

Panorama Stitching using Hugin

Ptgui is a paid application that is quite popular, but I've establish Hugin, a free alternative, to exist an excellent option. It isn't the most obvious to utilise, but it does have an "Assistant" interface that will walk y'all through the steps (in the new 2018 version this is called up by selecting Interface->Unproblematic). Get-go, you Load your images by dragging or using File Open up. Hugin accepts either JPEGs or TIFFs, so it is quite flexible. You volition need to fill in the focal length for your drone. For the Mavic Pro it is 28mm.

When you first load your images into Hugin they're a jumble, but the software will sort them out if there is enough overlap

When you first load your images into Hugin they're a jumble, but the software will sort them out if there is enough overlap

Once yous're in the Assistant interface, you can simply click on Pace ii, "Align…" Hugin fires up a background task that volition try to align and stitch the images using control points information technology identifies in their overlap. If all goes well, you tin can simply correct the horizon by dragging it up and down in the Layout view. Hugin will besides show you lot all the connections it has made between images. If you lot run into gray lines and then it couldn't connect some images. You can fix that by clicking on the Link and then identifying corresponding points between the images that Hugin can apply.

You can see some gray lines here showing that Hugin couldn't find corresponding points. We can add them manually if needed

You tin can run across some grey lines here showing that Hugin couldn't discover corresponding points. Nosotros tin can add them manually if needed

Sharing your 360-degree Panoramas

Facebook is most people'southward showtime target for sharing photos, and 360-degree photos are no exception. Facebook has made the process fairly like shooting fish in a barrel equally long as your paradigm covers the full 360-degrees ten 180-degrees, has the right metadata, and isn't over 10,000 pixels wide. You simply upload information technology like whatever other photograph and Facebook marks it as 360 and allows users to rotate through information technology using their mouse or past moving their mobile device. YouTube doesn't currently support 360-degree photos (although it does for video), just Google'due south Street View does.

Unfortunately, SmugMug, my favorite photo-sharing site, doesn't back up 360-degree photos, so I had to wait elsewhere for a quality hosting feel. So far Kuula.co has fit the bill. Their free subscription provides enough features for most users, and they have some actually nice viewing tools. Kuula too assumes all uploaded images are panoramas, and so for full spherical panoramas (360 10 180) you lot don't even need any additional metadata. Kuula too supports the oddly-popular Tiny Planet view of your spherical panoramas. Finally, Kuula supports higher-resolution panoramas. up to 16,384 pixels across — virtually double what y'all can upload to Facebook. Their Pro plans, starting at $eight per calendar month, permit some advanced features like Virtual Tours and Batch Uploading.

The Best Things about Drone Panoramas

Producing quality drone video takes a lot of work and background research on your location. But drone panoramas are piece of cake to shoot, can be done anywhere, and when automated don't require any manual intervention. You don't even take to venture far from your takeoff betoken to capture ane. Often just ascending is enough. That's about as safety as drone flying gets. Make sure and do some experiments to see what heights piece of work all-time for yous. I tend to like 150-200 anxiety for about situations. Likewise much higher and yous lose particular on the ground. However, if you've got tall buildings or mountains in the distance, similar in the image of Red Rock Canyon in this commodity, being college can help capture them.

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