Panorama process

ebrandon · Feb 21, 2018

I'm really into shooting panoramas with the Mavic Air and wanted to share how high quality the results can be.

While the panoramas straight out of the drone are pretty good, you can get higher resolution and fewer stitching artifacts by working with the individual images.

Here is a pano shot with the Air this weekend at the Lawrence Hall of Science in the hills above Berkeley, CA.

Lawrence Hall of Science

My workflow is:
(1) Shoot multiple panoramas on location - different heights, positions, and initial directions
(2) Preview the drone-generated panos at home to decide which ones are worth working on
(3) Take the 25 images that make up a pano and
(a) bring them into PTGui for stitching. Export stitched pano as TIFF.
(b) bring TIFF into Lightroom to adjust highlights/shadows/exposure/contrast/colors. Export to Photoshop.
(c) In Photoshop stretch sky to top. Paint in sky as needed for even edges & top. Resize down to 16000x8000 pixels. Export as JPG.
(4) Upload to Kuula.co to share online

paulus59 · Feb 21, 2018

wow !! wunderfull , one of these days i am gonna get into this real beautiful picture !
first i need to learn a lot wit my first drone the mavic air ;-) Great job done here

Garuda · Feb 21, 2018

Really nice work there! Great colors Thumbswayup

Noflo · Feb 21, 2018

Very nice pix can't wait to get my MA

abridge · Feb 21, 2018

how exactly have people been doing the globe pictures? I took a globe pano shot on my air but it just comes out as separate pictures on my phone.

djiboi · Mar 11, 2018

I have some questions. Can you work directly with DNG in PTGUI or do you import as uncomressed tiffs?

What do you enter here?

ebrandon · Mar 11, 2018

djiboi said:
I have some questions. Can you work directly with DNG in PTGUI or do you import as uncomressed tiffs?

What do you enter here?

1) I currently import the JPGs into PTGUI. I won't use the DNGs until either Lightroom or PTGUI has a lens distortion correction profile for the Mavic Air, neither of which have such a profile yet.
2) Only thing you need to enter is 5.333 in the crop factor.