How to take HDR 360 with AEB automatically

[GadgetGuy]

There are definite advantages to the DJI fully automated 360° pano creation from 26 20MP originals, all shot and stitched together in camera within a mere 60 seconds! Sometimes, efficiently trumps perfection!

 

[vili]

If i use 5 bracketed jpeg AEB exposures (not raw), Litchi will made the pano in max. 3-4 minutes.
If there is no or little wind, i dont have drifting or altitude change.
Main problem is that EV steps is small, sometimes i need more, but DJI sdk doesnt allow! Why?!

 

[Andrex]

If i use 5 bracketed jpeg AEB exposures (not raw), Litchi will made the pano in max. 3-4 minutes.
If there is no or little wind, i dont have drifting or altitude change.
Main problem is that EV steps is small, sometimes i need more, but DJI sdk doesnt allow! Why?!

How many photos in total is that? I can't remember my settings for no. of columns, but I ended up with 34 sets of 5 brackets (170 photos).

There are definite advantages to the DJI fully automated 360° pano creation from 26 20MP originals, all shot and stitched together in camera within a mere 60 seconds! Sometimes, efficiently trumps perfection!

As I've said to you before, it's (potentially) a trade off. Look at the photo I linked again. If I used DJI Go, the entire part of the town under the sun would have been overexposed and white, as it's shooting directly into the sun. Most of the rest of the shot would also have been exposed incorrectly. The actual issue I have with a part of my photo is probably less of a percent of the full image which is dodgy than the amount that would have been blown out if I had used DJI Go...

 

[vili]

22x5, total 110 photos

 

[brett8883]

Revisiting this almost a year on (because winter is when you tend to need to use HDR more to beat the low sun) this is today's shot from Shrewsbury in flood.

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Unfortunately using a 5-bracket AEB in Litchi means the 34-shot panorama took some time. What seems to have happened in the 5-10 minutes it took to complete a circle is the drone drifted in the wind (slightly) and also appears to have lost 10 m in altitude, which I didn't notice during shooting. The panorama started at c. 75 m above ground.

The result is unfortunately an issue in stitching the start and end seam of the panorama (parallax, and also a lack of sufficient overlap, but I think mainly paralax). Disappointingly, this is most pronounced for two of the town's spires - in the opening shot, the spires were below the horizon, but come the final shot the spire tip was above the horizon.

I attempted to manually fix in photoshop with clone tool, dodge, burn and the original frames, but I have struggled.

Apart from one slither of the photo representing probably 5 degrees, I'm happy with the rest. But a five degree aberration is pretty significant in a photo like this.

Lessons? Not sure. The naked eye probably wouldn't pick up on the potential parallax over 10 minutes of auto-pano shooting in particular between the start and end frames. A drone can drift a lot in 10 minutes. Better keep an eye on the altitude reading next time I guess. I don't think anything more can be done in post-processing to save it.

You might actually have some lens flare going on right there. I don’t think there’s much you can do

 

[kvc_dronepic]

I often use the 360 panorama mode in DJI Go app for creating 360 photos. I have settings set to capture RAW files, so that back home I can edit the 26 individual photos it takes and then stitch together using PT Gui.

I also sometimes use the automatic exposure bracketing (AEB) mode on individual photos to take 3-5 photos which are later merged to create HDR images.

What I'd like to know is, can I use AEB mode on a 360 pano, to create an HDR photo sphere?

Ideally the drone would do it all automatically, capturing 78 RAW (DNG) files for a 3-bracket AEB, for example.

Is this possible? I can't see it in the settings.

Make 3x pano360* with 0.7/0.0/+0.7 bracketing

 

[Andrex]

Make 3x pano360* with 0.7/0.0/+0.7 bracketing

The question was answered over a year ago and your reply doesn't help - the use of Litchi was reccomended some time ago. You didn't even make it clear which app you suggest using.

 

[betrcafe]

You could use Litchi to do this. Just set it so there’s a little bit of time between captures so the SD card can digest the three exposures before going to the next one.

Word of caution though, I don’t know that you will be able to maintain the HDR qualities of the photos into the 360 sphere.

An HDR photo before it is edited is either a 32 bit image or a 16 bit image with floating-point data that carries the dynamic range information.

A pano is a raster operation and most stitching programs will simply rasterize a raw image into a jpeg (8 bit photo) to create the pano stripping out the additional bit depth information (the dynamic range). There are programs like Lightroom that can retain the original dynamic range data after the pano operation but really that’s because it’s holding the pano calculations in cache and just re-processes the pano after each adjustment made to resulting pano. However, Lightroom doesn’t support 360 panos, at least not for easy use in a 360 viewer. You have to be careful with HDR photos so that you don’t strip out the dynamic range before you are done with it. Not all editors can handle it and most aren’t transparent about how they are treating the image.

Long way of saying that it may not be worth it. You could edit the HDR photos before stictching them together but you’d have to apply edits to each photo equally or it will come out looking weird which mostly negates the benefit of a HDR photo which is to be able to do local adjustments not otherwise feasible.

Hope you prove me wrong but my bet is that you aren’t gonna see an improvement in quality or dynamic range to justify the added time it will take to post process this.

I asked Litchi support yesterday (04.11.2025) and they told me current version doesn't support that feature for above mini 2 series.
Is there anyone figure out how automate sphere panorama and AEB together for dji mini 4 pro ?