Can you guys help an old guy

[SeaPig]

Thank you all "old one's" for this information. The last photography I did before my Mini 2 was 35mm stuff for my job.
Needles to say I have a lot of catching up to do with this interesting quest I am embarking on.

 

[waltermitty]

off topic: I just gave away 2., MINT condition Minox 35mm camera systems. Broke my heart. Not much value to young people now and more if you're a collector.

 

[akdrone]

haha...just point me to the class sign up sheet and I'll bring my senior bus pass

There are not that many things that can be changed in the setting of my Mini 2. I tend to do old fashion panos-e.g.: by taking 3 to 5 shots horizontally from left to right with a manual press of the shutter button, using the grid as my guide and trying overlap each image by about 30%. Once I have these images (I use the RAW ones), I upload the RAW images in Photoshop and never use the JGPs. The Mini 2 does not allow me to take only RAW. I must stake JPG+RAW. So on my MAC, after uploading the image, they are mixed together (JPG-RAW)> I separate them into a new RAW folder (right click, "type" or size, or rename). I work with the RAW images. I open them in Adobe Camera RAW (ACR). Select all (CTRL+A), right click on any image, to get a drop down menu, then high "merge to Panorama."

My Mini does not assemble or put together a pano for me! My M3 does. The drone generated pano is always thrown away (I find it a poor image).

Dale

I do a lot of panos with my tele lens on the Mavic 3 which also does not support shooting panos other than manually in the manner you meNtion. However I normally shoot 5xAEB and then use Lightroom to take all the AEB images, sometime 15 shots of 5AEB each, and combine them into an HDR pano. It‘s wonderful and I get much much better results.

 

[Talldiver]

I’m just another “old guy” loving drones and photography. Don’t let age stop you from learning and having fun. It sure beats sitting on the couch watching the boob tube. Although I do spend a lot of time sitting in front of the computer.

 

[SeaPig]

Amen Talldiver.
Even with a bad wing right now, I can still watch numerous videos on what NOT TO do with your drone....
Along with this forum, 51 drones, Pilot Institue and others, to tell and show people the correct way of going about this very interesting adventure..

 

[SmilingOgre]

I’m just another “old guy” loving drones and photography. Don’t let age stop you from learning and having fun. It sure beats sitting on the couch watching the boob tube. Although I do spend a lot of time sitting in front of the computer.

I despise the God Box. One constant insult to my intelligence.

 

[Bob Dempsey]

Hi Mikey - you questions are valid and I just looked at previous answers and I think you seem to be catching on. For more help I created a Facebook group just for us “Old Farts with Drones” we have over 11,000 members and help with questions every day. Good luck.

 

[EricF]

Like you, I started with film. But having a computer background, I moved to digital early on and haven't shot film since about 2003.

As others have noted, many applications can stitch 2 or more shots together: think of the old-school method of laying 2 negs down and carefully slicing off the overlapping parts to "combine" them into one — but with FAR more sophisticated control.

Some drone apps will do some of this internally: panoramas (including 360° panos) can be stitched together by combining a series of shots, but their resolution and exposure control may be limited. You'll usually get better results if you use SW to stitch the set of images taken. Some stitching tools can use the saved sensor data to "know" how much deviation there was in X, Y and Z directions when the image was captured; others can analyze the edge differences very accurately to eliminate stitching errors; and most can adjust variations in exposure.

Although it is no longer supported by Microsoft, the free Image Composite Editor application (ICE 2.03.0; download from here) does an excellent job of stitching many images into a variety of transformations.

I use ICE regularly for getting flat "planar" images: I fly the drone slowly in a straight line taking a number of shots straight down, then drag the images into ICE to stitch them together. The result can be a very large image with lots of detail. If I put it onto my personal website, I can link to it as an overlay in Google Earth. Using the GE tools, I can rotate, distort, and scale the overlay image to accurately "lay it over" the GE image layer. That gives me far better resolution for my area of interest than is possible with Google imagery. (For example, a tape measure showed that our garden rows were 50 feet; the Google Earth measure tool showed them to be 49' 11" — and with other planar images taken as the crops developed, I could easily see individual plants.)

If I use the Litchi "360° pano" mode, my Mini 2 will take 22 images as it rotates and tilts the camera gimbal. I can then drag & drop all 22 into ICE to stitch them together. With the "Orthographic" projection, it'll combine them into a partial sphere (no top images since the drone can't "look up"). I can then use ICE tools to change the orientation (roll, pitch & yaw) and the zoom level to get what I want in the main focus. I can then crop it (or not), and save it as a composite image. Typically, for my Mini 2, the composite will be 10,235×10,235 pixels (~105MB), so lots of detail. Here's an example of a "tiny planet" view of my house & property last fall using an orthographic projection.

 

[jephoto]

So they are taking multiple images?
Hitting the camera button a bunch while flyingthen digitally combining the images later?
Sorry…. Just don’t understand
It’s not you guys… I’m just old school , where you hit a shutter button and then deal with the image 1at a time

I honstely didn’t know you could combine multiple images into one

Hey Mikey

Stitched panoramic images doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a super wide angle panel. That’s narrow top and bottom. It’s any group of images that can be stitched together. And it is not done flying horizontally and taking a series of pictures, but rather having the camera or drone, stationary, and rotating from that point from left to right and up and down if you want multiple rows.
If the camera does not shoot all the images from the same viewpoint, then each shot, and each object in a shot will have slightly different point of view from the photo next to it, and the shape of the objects, as well as shadows and things in front of or behind other images, such as trees, houses, mountains, etc. Won’t line up the same. And you’ll have stitching errors.
So the camera for example can take one picture straight ahead one picture with at least 30% overlapping to the left and one to the right and light room, Photoshop, or a number of other software’s will stitch those together seamlessly into look, like it was one image.

And you can do the same thing by taking one shot straight ahead tip your camera up 30° take a shot take the camera down 30° when shot come back to center, rotate a little bit one direction or the other, leaving a generous amount of overlap about 30%, and do it again one shot straight ahead when shot slightly up when shot down. So you can take as many photos as you want. As long as the camera doesn’t change position. That’s how a 360° x 180 spherical panorama is made. It just goes in a complete circle and does more rows up and down, including one that’s straight down at the bottom.
For drones it’s very difficult to get a complete sphere as your upward angle is limited so software that does a complete 360 x 180 drones will actually fake a top row to fill it in so it appears like blue sky

I most often like to take two and three shot panoramas to keep the distortion down to a minimum. Otherwise you get the fisheye affect.

The shot below is nine frames. That’s three rows of three images shot with a phantom 3 pro.
This particular scene works really well because you can’t tell if there’s any landscape distortion. Just looks like the road follows the line of the lake For landscapes and skies it can be pretty spectacular.

 

[akdrone]

Hey Mikey

Stitched panoramic images doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a super wide angle panel. That’s narrow top and bottom. It’s any group of images that can be stitched together. And it is not done flying horizontally and taking a series of pictures, but rather having the camera or drone, stationary, and rotating from that point from left to right and up and down if you want multiple rows.
If the camera does not shoot all the images from the same viewpoint, then each shot, and each object in a shot will have slightly different point of view from the photo next to it, and the shape of the objects, as well as shadows and things in front of or behind other images, such as trees, houses, mountains, etc. Won’t line up the same. And you’ll have stitching errors.
So the camera for example can take one picture straight ahead one picture with at least 30% overlapping to the left and one to the right and light room, Photoshop, or a number of other software’s will stitch those together seamlessly into look, like it was one image.

And you can do the same thing by taking one shot straight ahead tip your camera up 30° take a shot take the camera down 30° when shot come back to center, rotate a little bit one direction or the other, leaving a generous amount of overlap about 30%, and do it again one shot straight ahead when shot slightly up when shot down. So you can take as many photos as you want. As long as the camera doesn’t change position. That’s how a 360° x 180 spherical panorama is made. It just goes in a complete circle and does more rows up and down, including one that’s straight down at the bottom.
For drones it’s very difficult to get a complete sphere as your upward angle is limited so software that does a complete 360 x 180 drones will actually fake a top row to fill it in so it appears like blue sky

I most often like to take two and three shot panoramas to keep the distortion down to a minimum. Otherwise you get the fisheye affect.

The shot below is nine frames. That’s three rows of three images shot with a phantom 3 pro.
This particular scene works really well because you can’t tell if there’s any landscape distortion. Just looks like the road follows the line of the lake For landscapes and skies it can be pretty spectacular. View attachment 160002

Stunning

 

[RangerEd]

I’m not sure
Apologize
I’ll just see some great photo, and the comment will say
“ stitched together, or combined images”
Just honestly didn’t know what that meant

They don’t usually look panoramic I guess ?
But maybe they are and I don’t know the difference?

There are software applications that can "stitch" or put together pictures that makes it into one picture. For example, if you fly your drone and position it to where you can take at least a couple of pictures. Take one picture, pan your drone left or right making sure that they overlap a little, and then take another one. You can download the picture and then run them through the software app to stitch the two pictures. In this case you'll get a wider field of view. You can do the same going up and down, right and left, and you can stitch all four to give you a bigger picture. Google "software application to stitch photos together" and you'll get a list of applications. Some are free, some are free trial, etc.

 

[stonecherub]

Mickey S:

This is, in fact, rocket science - of a kind. Digital photography and planetary probes sort of grew up together. The cost of sending cameras to the moon, or mars, or further, is (was) "astronomical" (to coin a phrase). Somebody, early on, figured out that only one camera was needed, the one with the longest practical telephoto lens. Normal and wide-angle views could be made by scanning across a viewscape in blocks and joining the blocks together to make one image. I spent a couple hundred bucks on a battery powered rig to do just that. It failed due to camera jiggle.

While this was not easy, planetary exploration provided a bucket of money to pay for exploration tools - like stitching images together - and the job got done on the people's dime! I doubt that, if all of the landscape photographers in the world had got together, they could have afforded the initial programming (this is a guess). Around the turn of the millennium, as I dimly remember, stitching programs started showing up. Some in the public domain, some proprietary and vastly expensive (for a very short while). Most were difficult to use and yielded some very strange results. Today, of course, they're one of the casual choices in Photoshop.

Many times, as I have watched social media digest the civilization where I live, I have thought that being an old man is a blessing. But this stuff is exciting!

 

[smashse]

I do orthomosaic maps all of the time. One I did was 318 NADIR images (exactly vertical) of my 22 acre property. The image files at a decent resolution can get pretty big, but combined and/or stitched shots are what they sound like. Multiple overlapping frames that are combined into a normally larger image.

 

[jephoto]

Stunning

Thx AK. One of those “right time,right place” things. Just as I was finishing shooting these frames it started to rain & I had to Linda pretty quickly.