Panoramas shots are darker than other pictures ? normal ?

[KONY]

hello,

been flying MAVIC drone for years...but on my MAVIC 2 i noticed something lately : whatever brightness i select, the panorama shots are always much darker than the plain 16:9 images taken at the same moment ?

is that a new thing ? i never noticed this the months before and i bought my mavic 2 PRO last august..is that due to a firmware update ?

because of this i need to increase the brightness/exposure in lightroom in every sigle panorama shot

(also this is when shooting in auto mode not manual)

 

[CanadaDrone]

I believe the M2P locks exposure during the pano, and if it's a normal landscape scene with a horizon, it's going to take pictures of the sky and the foreground, so exposure is likely to be a bit of a disaster with so many different brightness levels and that may be exaggerated depending on the camera settings. Mine are like that too sometimes with the JPEG the drone spits out, but I always stitch my own panos from the RAW images in post. DJI's stitching is also pretty bad, so I would always recommend manual pano creation anyway - there is a setting for the drone to keep all the RAWs from the panos so you can later stitch them in Photoshop or whatever program you like.

With a single image, the meter in the drone's camera can much more accurately pick a balanced exposure if you're shooting in auto exposure mode.

 

[KONY]

Thank you for your very interesting feedback.

True that working on raw will give much better results...I would use raw more often if the created files were not so huge

 

[CJG]

In my experience, panoramas never really work well using auto exposure/white balance for the reasons given above. I fix white balance to the conditions and then manually take a set of panorama shots at -1, 0 and +1 EV. You can then either just work with the panorama with the best overall exposure or combine the 3 panoramas into a HDR image. I use Lightroom Classic for stitching the panoramas. Lightroom doesn’t really do HDRs from panoramas (although the new “HDR Panorama” feature sometimes works) but HDR EFEX pro in the Nik collection plug-ins (and you can still get a free unsupported version of this collection) works fine.

 

[KONY]

Ok thanx for the tip