Any luck using Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom to stitch 360 panoramas?

[martinpagh]

Hey there,

My Mavic Air does a decent job stitching a 360 panorama JPG when I shoot panos, but I prefer to use a dedicated tool on my PC instead working with the RAW photo assets

I have a license for Creative Cloud, and both Photoshop and Lightroom are supposed to be able to stitch together a 360 panorama, but so far the results I've gotten aren't great, they leave out giant empty spots and the projection is wrong. I suspect it's because the Mavic Air fakes the sky.

Has anyone successfully stitched together a 360 pano in Photoshop? And if so, how did you do it. Trying to avoid spending money on PTGui or Autopano.

 

[Stimmy]

I don't know if was 360 but it was pretty close I'd assume. I just snapped consecutive pics along the same axis every 30 degrees or so and used lightroom to stitch it together.

I have better results with lightroom than I do with dji algorithms. And that's to be expected.

 

[martinpagh]

Yeah, that'll work for sure, but I'm talking about when you use the pano photo mode in the Mavic, not when you shoot it manually. And I do need the full 360 sphere for what I'm doing.

Great shot, btw ...

 

[LivinLarge]

Have you tried Microsoft ICE? It works well and is free. It will even create 360 panos from video. Here is a sample stitched from video with ICE.
Kuula | Share 360/VR photos and build virtual tours!

 

[Kilrah]

Photoshop and Lightroom (still...) don't know what 360° is so while the flat image is perfect they don't match the seam at the ends.

Need to use other tools, ICE mentioned above, PTGUI, Hugin,...

 

[martinpagh]

Photoshop and Lightroom (still...) don't know what 360° is so while the flat image is perfect they don't match the seam at the ends.

Need to use other tools, ICE mentioned above, PTGUI, Hugin,...

They do, since late 2017, I've stitched plenty of 360 images with both. But I can't get it to work with the raw assets from the Mavic AIR when I shoot a panorama with it.

Tried Microsoft ICE, and while it seems to be a pretty good piece of software for the price (free), it has the same problem, that it can't automatically fill out the missing sky. But it does a really good job at stitching the rest of the image, so maybe that's not a terrible solution. I just have figure out how to fake the sky myself.

 

[Kilrah]

How do you get the stitching line to be seamless? Must be missing an option and everything I searched online said there wasn't one.

The rest is no issue, you can resize canvas in PS (top only) so that height = half the pixel count of width which will put the horizon at center as it has to be, then use content-aware fill to fix the sky if it's not too detailed (usually better than nothing). That's actually how I fill the sky after stitching with ICE.

Example

 

[LivinLarge]

How to fill in the sky with PS.
Follow this tutorial starting at 2:30

 

[martinpagh]

How do you get the stitching line to be seamless? Must be missing an option and everything I searched online said there wasn't one.

The rest is no issue, you can resize canvas in PS (top only) so that height = half the pixel count of width which will put the horizon at center as it has to be, then use content-aware fill to fix the sky if it's not too detailed (usually better than nothing). That's actually how I fill the sky after stitching with ICE.

Example

You know what, just tested, and Lightroom DID actually leave a bit of a stitch line. Nothing I couldn't fix though, but might as well use ICE, since it doesn't leave the same stitch line. I haven't had that issue before, but that might be because I've only been stitching images shot on dedicated, multi-lens 360 cameras.

Content-aware fill can be a bit of a hit and miss situation, in this case it created a massive island in the sky

 

[Kilrah]

OK, I'm not crazy then

With content-aware fill even if it's slow to run on the ~180MP images you can get from processing and stitching RAWs it's worth trying to vary the selection size a bit. On "difficult" skies I try maybe 5-10 different selections, changing the selection height by 50px or so. Then keep the best result, which will of course not be perfect but again jsut remember the black sky patch you initially had and how much better it is (even if PS not being 360 aware still causes a stitch line there).

I've posted it before but usually stitch in LR only to get a "whole image preview". I adjust that to my lliking based on the flat view, then copy the develop settings to all images. Export those as JPG, and stitch in ICE. Take the result into PS, fix the cavas size and content-aware-fill using the process described above.

 

[martinpagh]

OK, I'm not crazy then

With content-aware fill even if it's slow to run on the ~180MP images you can get from processing and stitching RAWs it's worth trying to vary the selection size a bit. On "difficult" skies I try maybe 5-10 different selections, changing the selection height by 50px or so. Then keep the best result, which will of course not be perfect but again jsut remember the black sky patch you initially had and how much better it is (even if PS not being 360 aware still causes a stitch line there).

Fortunately I have a pretty fast computer, so it's not too bad, I can try a few things fairly quickly. Also I scale down my panorama's to 16384px width, because power of 2 sizes always perform better in 3D software, and that reduces the image to about 100MP.

Biggest issue I have right now is the sun. It looks amazing in my photo, because it was shot in great light and with the right filter, but it's also hard to get the right blue sky above the sun, without doing a lot of manual retouching.

I've posted it before but usually stitch in LR only to get a "whole image preview". I adjust that to my lliking based on the flat view, then copy the develop settings to all images. Export those as JPG, and stitch in ICE. Take the result into PS, fix the cavas size and content-aware-fill using the process described above.

I followed your suggestion for how to use LR to get the best develop settings, and it really worked wonders. Quite a few steps in that, but the end result was really good, so definitely worth it.

 

[Havier]

Have you tried Microsoft ICE? It works well and is free. It will even create 360 panos from video. Here is a sample stitched from video with ICE.
Kuula | Share 360/VR photos and build virtual tours!

Hi LivinLarge, how can I get a video from my Mavic Air and create a 360 pano photo like your wonderful Lake photo?

 

[charlas]

+1 for using light room or Photoshop.. The dji onboard never seems to quite get it right

 

[LivinLarge]

Lock your exposure based on a middle tone in the scene you are photographing. Do not use ND filters so that the shutter speed will be fast.
Launch the drone to the desired altitude, point the camera up and start video.
Yaw smoothly for a full 360 degrees.
Tilt the camera down a bit so that you have about 1/3 of the frame overlapping the previous starting point. Rotate 360 degrees again.
Repeat until you have made a full revolution with the camera pointing straight down.
Stop the video, land and transfer to your computer.
Download and install Microsoft ICE. It's free.
Open the program and choose New Panorama from Video.
Select your video file and choose the start and end points to use from the file.
Let the program figure out the panorama type and stitch the video frames.
You can let the program autocomplete any missing part.
Export the stitched panorama to disk.
You may need to resize the image and add metadata so that it will be recognized as a 360 panorama.

Here is a tutorial for creating 360 panos with the Typhoon H. The last part of it explains how I resize the pano, fill in the sky and edit the metadata.

 

[Havier]

Thanks LivinLarge.
But will the video have to be only one with the different camera tilts?
Microsoft ICE does not allow to import multiple videos ...

 

[Havier]

Thank you too Charlas.
Do you work with photomerge?

 

[Havier]

Lock your exposure based on a middle tone in the scene you are photographing. Do not use ND filters so that the shutter speed will be fast.
Launch the drone to the desired altitude, point the camera up and start video.
Yaw smoothly for a full 360 degrees.
Tilt the camera down a bit so that you have about 1/3 of the frame overlapping the previous starting point. Rotate 360 degrees again.
Repeat until you have made a full revolution with the camera pointing straight down.
Stop the video, land and transfer to your computer.
Download and install Microsoft ICE. It's free.
Open the program and choose New Panorama from Video.
Select your video file and choose the start and end points to use from the file.
Let the program figure out the panorama type and stitch the video frames.
You can let the program autocomplete any missing part.
Export the stitched panorama to disk.
You may need to resize the image and add metadata so that it will be recognized as a 360 panorama.

Here is a tutorial for creating 360 panos with the Typhoon H. The last part of it explains how I resize the pano, fill in the sky and edit the metadata.

Done!
With only one video captured, MS ICE works fine.
Do you add the sky with resize the canvas in Photoshop?
And it's better to set the resolution in 4k, right?

 

[gnirtS]

Microsoft ICE to stitch then Photoshops 3D/360 workspace to edit it. Works nicely.

Doing it from video is going to give you significantly worse resolution and compression artefacts so photos is also going to win.