Struggling to get a 360 pano

[djiboi]

OK it seems that ICE doesn't like the dji jpgs. If I convert the dngs to jpg, it happily stitches them. Just done a quick comparison and here are my findings. let me know if you think different.

DJI GO

• Does not always stitched properly
• Output is low res and not dng
• Free
• Does not require external tools
• Example DJIGO

MS ICE

• Needs sky stretching manually in photoshop
• Does not align horizon
• Free
• Auto crop
• High res output if you use tiff
• Example MSICEDNG2JPG

PTGUI

• Needs sky stretching manually in photoshop
• Aligns horizon
• Not free
• No Auto crop?
• High res output if you use tiff
• Example PTGUI

Just need to work out the best to add the Facebook metadata now

 

[Logger]

Could it be that you are missing images. Whenever I capture a 360 with DJIGo4 it captures 34 images whereas you only have 25?

 

[djiboi]

Not sure why, but the Mavic Air only captures 25 images, at least for me anyway

 

[Qoncussion]

OK it seems that ICE doesn't like the dji jpgs. If I convert the dngs to jpg, it happily stitches them. Just done a quick comparison and here are my findings. let me know if you think different.

DJI GO

• Does not always stitched properly
• Output is low res and not dng
• Free
• Does not require external tools
• Example DJIGO

MS ICE

• Needs sky stretching manually in photoshop
• Does not align horizon
• Free
• Auto crop
• High res output if you use tiff
• Example MSICEDNG2JPG

PTGUI

• Needs sky stretching manually in photoshop
• Aligns horizon
• Not free
• No Auto crop?
• High res output if you use tiff
• Example PTGUI

Just need to work out the best to add the Facebook metadata now

If you really want to step up your game, check out Autopano Giga. It's the best stitching program out there...

Kolor | Features of Autopano - panorama software

 

[Logger]

....

DJI GO

• Does not always stitched properly
• Output is low res and not dng
• Free
• Does not require external tools
• Example DJIGO

I am curious how do you get the DJIGO pano output to you PC or MAC? Are you shooting with a IOS or android phone. Just that with android I see it makes the pano in app them there is some option to copy if to the Mavic SD card once complete in the Gallery tool thingy. Is that how you do it?

MS ICE

• Needs sky stretching manually in photoshop
• Does not align horizon
• Free
• Auto crop
• High res output if you use tiff
• Example MSICEDNG2JPG

That is interesting. I find it hit and miss between MS ICE and PTGUI as to how well the horizon aligns. I often see better horizon results with ICE prior prior to manipulating anything.

PTGUI

• Needs sky stretching manually in photoshop
• Aligns horizon
• Not free
• No Auto crop?
• High res output if you use tiff
• Example PTGUI

You don't actually need to Sky stretch in PS. As long as you have PTGUI set at 2:1 it will expand the canvas and fill the zenith in black. Granted you may still wish to replace the black hole with sky. Difference being that with MS ICE who absolutely must go to PS and manually expand the canvas (or sky stretch) to make the file usable in 360 viewer.




I find the align horizon tool to be troublesome in PTGUI. Post stitch I commonly a wonky horizon in PTGUI. At my locale there is often ocean on one side and mountains on the other. PTGUI almost always sinks the ocean well below the horizon and raises the mountains too high. Having said this, it has plenty of capability to subsequently straighten the horizon using various methods.

PTGUI has Masking which none of the others have. ICE masks things without you even knowing they were there. It might remove a half car from the pano or a bird in the sky that was in some of the images but not all. Whereas PTGUI lets you control this. So you can mask out half a bus that appears in one image that looks weird.

Just need to work out the best to add the Facebook metadata now

Cant you just post it on the Facebook from Kuula or is there more info you need to add?

 

[Logger]

If you really want to step up your game, check out Autopano Giga. It's the best stitching program out there...

Kolor | Features of Autopano - panorama software

I evaluated them both thoroughly and think PTGUI and AutoPano are about on par. I felt Kolor was becoming overly focused on their 360 video packages at the expense of their still image product. The new PTGUI v11 interface is developing very nicely with frequent updates from the dev.

 

[djiboi]

I am curious how do you get the DJIGO pano output to you PC or MAC? Are you shooting with a IOS or android phone. Just that with android I see it makes the pano in app them there is some option to copy if to the Mavic SD card once complete in the Gallery tool thingy. Is that how you do it? That is interesting. I find it hit and miss between MS ICE and PTGUI as to how well the horizon aligns. I often see better horizon results with ICE prior prior to manipulating anything.
You don't actually need to Sky stretch in PS. As long as you have PTGUI set at 2:1 it will expand the canvas and fill the zenith in black. Granted you may still wish to replace the black hole with sky. Difference being that with MS ICE who absolutely must go to PS and manually expand the canvas (or sky stretch) to make the file usable in 360 viewer.

View attachment 34179


I find the align horizon tool to be troublesome in PTGUI. Post stitch I commonly a wonky horizon in PTGUI. At my locale there is often ocean on one side and mountains on the other. PTGUI almost always sinks the ocean well below the horizon and raises the mountains too high. Having said this, it has plenty of capability to subsequently straighten the horizon using various methods.

PTGUI has Masking which none of the others have. ICE masks things without you even knowing they were there. It might remove a half car from the pano or a bird in the sky that was in some of the images but not all. Whereas PTGUI lets you control this. So you can mask out half a bus that appears in one image that looks weird.

Cant you just post it on the Facebook from Kuula or is there more info you need to add?

On android, I viewed the pano in the dji go gallery. Clicked the download button, then either connect the drone to my pc via usb cable and copied the file from \DCIM\100MEDIA\ or just email myself the file from the android gallery.

You are right about PT GUI outputting the correct 2:1 ratio but I prefer a blue sky, so will go the PS route.

I'll be honest, i've not played around with the horizon options much yet as both produced a horizon I was happy with.

Masking, again i've not really had chance or need to play with yet.

I could post from Kuula but it is just a web link, not embedded. In the end I went with Exif Fixer - a tool for the 360 Facebook and Google communities to generate the correct exif data. The trick I found is that FB panos must be under 45mb as well as having the correct 2:1 ratio and exif data

 

[Logger]

On android, I viewed the pano in the dji go gallery. Clicked the download button, then either connect the drone to my pc via usb cable and copied the file from \DCIM\100MEDIA\ or just email myself the file from the android gallery.

Ah thanks that makes sense.

<snip>
I could post from Kuula but it is just a web link, not embedded. In the end I went with Exif Fixer - a tool for the 360 Facebook and Google communities to generate the correct exif data. The trick I found is that FB panos must be under 45mb as well as having the correct 2:1 ratio and exif data

You can actually embed kuula in FB and it does not have to be a link. Image below is of a embedded Kuula pano in a FB feed.



This a reply I got from the very responsive Kuula support team when I asked a little while back..

So to share as native Facebook 360 you need to be registered and logged in on Kuula,
allow Kuula app to post on your timeline and the photo you share this way needs to be posted by you.
So this only works for the author of the photo, not for other people.

Others can share photos from Kuula using the preview link. This is easy and available to anyone,
even for non-registered Kuula visitors.

BTW the Kuula embedding is really nice and unobtrusive IMO.
Same image as in FB above is embedded in this web page Sophia Landy Equestrian down toward the bottom. I like the way Kuula allows you to remove all their branding.

 

[djiboi]

Perfect! There are 2 facebook share options, this time I chose the 2nd one called Facebook 360 or something like that. Saves me messing around in lightroom and exif fixer. Thanks

 

[djiboi]

If you really want to step up your game, check out Autopano Giga. It's the best stitching program out there...

Kolor | Features of Autopano - panorama software

Not sure what it offers different from PTGUI/ICE. Had a quick play and it struggled to detect my photos as 1 pano rather than 2. I did manage to fix it by forcing the images to be a single pano in the settings panel. Can it auto fill in the sky and make a 2:1 image?

 

[Qoncussion]

I mentioned this in an earlier post, above... If you guys are interested in a nice method for filling in the sky - you can always do what I did, and mount a sports cam to the top of the Mavic.

Here's a recent 360x180, combing images from the Mavic and the GoPro Hero5 Session. No need to create or stretch the sky, when shooting like this - as I am photographing the entire scene.

Bear Valley Snow, March 11, 2018

 

[Qoncussion]

Can it auto fill in the sky and make a 2:1 image?

Nope. I've never found a program that can fill in the sky (correctly) - especially for a cloudy day, where clouds are cut in half across the top frames. I created this sky in PS CS6 - where the transition from photos to graphics is completely gone:

Bear Valley - Clear Blue Day in February 2018

 

[Logger]

I mentioned this in an earlier post, above... If you guys are interested in a nice method for filling in the sky - you can always do what I did, and mount a sports cam to the top of the Mavic.

Clever idea. Particularly if there is actually something other than just blue hues int he sky that you wish to capture. But I rarely look up toward the tops of my panos anyhow. Most of the stuff of interest is below the zenith like in this one

Walkerville South, Waratah Bay, Victoria

 

[Logger]

A really good feature of PTGUI is the ability to save a Pano Project as a template. This gives you the ability to store the schema or layout of a previously well stitched image set and use it as a basis for subsequent panos taken in difficult conditions with the same setup. So I now have PTGUI templates for Litchi, DJIGo4 and Hangar360.

If there is too much blue sky and non-descript water in an image set, MS ICE will not create a workable result and miss images entirely. PTGUI will struggle to align them initially. You can see in the first example under #30 there are several misplaced images stacked.



But then you just apply your stored template...



and the images align properly ready to be tweaked with control points if need be.

 

[SpanishSurfer]

A lot of good advice here, let me add to the discussion.


If you want to create pro level photos of any kind (360° included), you need to get accustomed to shooting in RAW (DNG); if you don't like to edit your photos later then you must ensure your manual settings are correct prior to taking the photos.

Here's a very simplified version of my workflow.

1. Shoot your pano in raw.
a. If you are shooting a static scene and want a cleaner/higher res photo, check this out: A Practical Guide to Creating Superresolution Photos with Photoshop increases your workload by a lot but the results are worth it.

2. Using Adobe Lightroom, edit all of your pano photos to your liking (ensure color balance and lighting levels are all similar, histogram is excellent for this, graduated filters are your FRIEND!). This is makes the difference between pro and amateur.
a. Export all of your photos as JPG for use in MS ICE (MS ICE uses the preview image of DNGs not the full res image, IMPORTANT to know!)

3. Using MSICE, import your edited photos and follow previous direction on stitching.

4. Open newly exported 360 pano in photoshop and make any necessary edits (blurry bird in the sky, 2 headed people, etc).

5. Upload to your desired 360 photo service.

This process usually takes me 30 min if I'm rushing and as much as 2-3 hours if I really want a photo to look great; especially if I'm layer stacking 15-20 360 photos on top of each other to make the image really POP!


Good luck!

 

[Luuuuuuke]

Hi Guys

Not sure if this discussion is dead now or what, but it's the most closely related one to my problem I can find. I've read through it but nobody seems to be having my specific issue.

I've just got a Mavic 2 Pro and I'm trying to do some spherical panoramas. Looking at the manual it says the panoramas should be 3 rows of 8 images plus one for the bottom, so 25 in total. That said, there are actually 26 in the folder so not sure what's going on there, but that's beside the point of this post. Obviously the drone doesn't photograph the sky so that needs adding in later, I get that.

The DJI software stitches them together and magically adds some sky. It does a pretty good job but the images it produces are too low resolution for my requirements and I want to be able to edit them to enhance the quality etc., so am looking to work with the RAW images. The ready-stitched versions are only in JPEG, not RAW like it saves the individual ones.

I want to view them in my HTC Vive Pro so having a really high resolution is critical. As is having a 2:1 image ratio.

The crux of my problem is this: whenever the photos have been stitched in Photoshop or Lightroom, the bottom of the image (nadir) is pinched (see image). This occurs before I've even touched the image ratio or tried to add any sky. I've even tried to create some additional plain blue images before stitching (9 in total - another row of 8 then 1 for the top) thinking that might be the problem so was trying to trick the software, but that just went completely wrong.

Running them through ICE is no good; it does stitch them correctly but seems to dramatically reduce the resolution. PS and LR output massive images, which is exactly what I'm after, it's just they aren't stitched properly.

I've played around with all the settings but can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I know how to add some extra canvas and fill in the sky afterwards (using any one of various methods, but not really relevant to my question) so that isn't an issue, but the problem is occurring before I even get to that stage. The image isn't pinched in the ready-stitched version the drone outputs - it's fine.

Help please! I've wasted more time on this than I care to admit so far!

 

[SpanishSurfer]

Hi Guys

Not sure if this discussion is dead now or what, but it's the most closely related one to my problem I can find. I've read through it but nobody seems to be having my specific issue.

I've just got a Mavic 2 Pro and I'm trying to do some spherical panoramas. Looking at the manual it says the panoramas should be 3 rows of 8 images plus one for the bottom, so 25 in total. That said, there are actually 26 in the folder so not sure what's going on there, but that's beside the point of this post. Obviously the drone doesn't photograph the sky so that needs adding in later, I get that.

The DJI software stitches them together and magically adds some sky. It does a pretty good job but the images it produces are too low resolution for my requirements and I want to be able to edit them to enhance the quality etc., so am looking to work with the RAW images. The ready-stitched versions are only in JPEG, not RAW like it saves the individual ones.

I want to view them in my HTC Vive Pro so having a really high resolution is critical. As is having a 2:1 image ratio.

The crux of my problem is this: whenever the photos have been stitched in Photoshop or Lightroom, the bottom of the image (nadir) is pinched (see image). This occurs before I've even touched the image ratio or tried to add any sky. I've even tried to create some additional plain blue images before stitching (9 in total - another row of 8 then 1 for the top) thinking that might be the problem so was trying to trick the software, but that just went completely wrong.

Running them through ICE is no good; it does stitch them correctly but seems to dramatically reduce the resolution. PS and LR output massive images, which is exactly what I'm after, it's just they aren't stitched properly.

I've played around with all the settings but can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I know how to add some extra canvas and fill in the sky afterwards (using any one of various methods, but not really relevant to my question) so that isn't an issue, but the problem is occurring before I even get to that stage. The image isn't pinched in the ready-stitched version the drone outputs - it's fine.

Help please! I've wasted more time on this than I care to admit so far!

Read my post right above yours concerning MSICE

 

[Luuuuuuke]

But does ICE not reduce the resolution?

Must be honest, I think I may have been using the DNG files, which you say only uses the preview image, so maybe that’s why I’m getting low res. Will try again tomorrow.

Just out of interest, though, does anyone happen to know why PS isn’t stitching it correctly? Would be nice to be able to stitch all the RAWs together before applying the edits, so that it’s uniform across the entire image.

Cheers.