Weird Circles showing up in my Sky? How to fix?

[run2jeepn]

I just noticed these yesterday. I was editing a pano on my phone with Snapseed and over did the Saturation a little, not a lot. I noticed a faint circular image in the sky. played with the image more and really over did the processing and you can see them spaced throughout the sky. It's not just in snapseed either. I edited a RAW file in Photoshop and still had an issue with it. What is causing this and how do I fix it?

Untouched

A little extra Saturation

WAY OVER DONE.. But done to just show the circles better...

Here is one I did last week. Used the Burn Tool on the sky. You can see the top half of one to the far left..

 

[Meta4]

I just noticed these yesterday. I was editing a pano on my phone with Snapseed and over did the Saturation a little, not a lot. I noticed a faint circular image in the sky. played with the image more and really over did the processing and you can see them spaced throughout the sky. It's not just in snapseed either. I edited a RAW file in Photoshop and still had an issue with it. What is causing this and how do I fix it?

If you aren't getting circles in single images, they must be added by the parorama stitching.
You caould always take individual images and stitch them yourself.

 

[brett8883]

I just noticed these yesterday. I was editing a pano on my phone with Snapseed and over did the Saturation a little, not a lot. I noticed a faint circular image in the sky. played with the image more and really over did the processing and you can see them spaced throughout the sky. It's not just in snapseed either. I edited a RAW file in Photoshop and still had an issue with it. What is causing this and how do I fix it?

Untouched

A little extra Saturation

WAY OVER DONE.. But done to just show the circles better...

Here is one I did last week. Used the Burn Tool on the sky. You can see the top half of one to the far left..

I’m sorry I’m advance for the long post.

This is a blown highlight problem and using the wrong tools to fix it. There’s nothing worse for an editor then having to deal with blown highlights because of the issue you are experiencing. A blown highlight is when bright parts of the image that are not white get exposed in the frame as white then there’s a cascading effect. basically that part of the image is not properly exposed. You actually demonstrated this when you used the burn tool because the burn tool just reduces the luma value of the pixels it will not change the color or create something that’s not there already. So burn tool on white just turns it grey and so the interior on the circles were white and the other rings were because of the cascading effect. There’s not enough stops to record all those possible values. I hope that made sense let me know if it didn’t.

Always set your exposure for the brightest area of your scene because it’s much easier to deal with clipped blacks then blown highlights.

Typically you’d be right to use non-destructive tools to correct your photos but in this case we need destructive editing because we have to create something that the camera never recorded. Dodge/burn, saturation, highlights, blacks, whites these are just going to change the nature of the information that the camera recorded.

Every pixel has a red, blue, and green value. Let’s say it’s one to ten for each channel. Black is 0 0 0, and white is 10 10 10. The burn tool is just gonna reduce all three of those values so now it’s 9 9 9. So you can see where if the center of those circles was 10 10 10, the next layer was 9 9 9, etc. With a blown highlight maybe the center was really 10, 11, 11 but the camera can only record up to 10 so you wind up with 10,10,10 and lose that detail.
So we have to create something that wasn’t there before. I’ve used a clone stamp tool in photoshop to paint over those white areas with another part of your sky and blended it in. I then painted on just a very very slight amount of black to create detail where there wasn’t any.

I now was able to flatten the image and convert to a smart object and brought it into the camera raw filter to edit it normally. I used a graduated filter to edit the bottom half without changing the work I did to the top and gradually blend it into the frame.

Your histogram looked good so it’s not that there’s anything wrong with the light meter it’s just that in a shot like this it would be better to use spot metering or center weighted metering.

There also a setting in the camera setting which is called “overexposed.” This will show you on screen when there is a blown highlight by showing it as a black and white zebra stripe alerting you that you need to reduce your exposure so you don’t have this issue.

 

[run2jeepn]

If you aren't getting circles in single images, they must be added by the parorama stitching.
You caould always take individual images and stitch them yourself.

Do I need to manual take the Pictures or does the Mavic Save the individual pictures from the Pano for me? Because I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

 

[run2jeepn]

View attachment 70847

I’m sorry I’m advance for the long post.

This is a blown highlight problem and using the wrong tools to fix it. There’s nothing worse for an editor then having to deal with blown highlights because of the issue you are experiencing. A blown highlight is when bright parts of the image that are not white get exposed in the frame as white then there’s a cascading effect. basically that part of the image is not properly exposed. You actually demonstrated this when you used the burn tool because the burn tool just reduces the luma value of the pixels it will not change the color or create something that’s not there already. So burn tool on white just turns it grey and so the interior on the circles were white and the other rings were because of the cascading effect. There’s not enough stops to record all those possible values. I hope that made sense let me know if it didn’t.

Always set your exposure for the brightest area of your scene because it’s much easier to deal with clipped blacks then blown highlights.

Typically you’d be right to use non-destructive tools to correct your photos but in this case we need destructive editing because we have to create something that the camera never recorded. Dodge/burn, saturation, highlights, blacks, whites these are just going to change the nature of the information that the camera recorded.

Every pixel has a red, blue, and green value. Let’s say it’s one to ten for each channel. Black is 0 0 0, and white is 10 10 10. The burn tool is just gonna reduce all three of those values so now it’s 9 9 9. So you can see where if the center of those circles was 10 10 10, the next layer was 9 9 9, etc. With a blown highlight maybe the center was really 10, 11, 11 but the camera can only record up to 10 so you wind up with 10,10,10 and lose that detail.
So we have to create something that wasn’t there before. I’ve used a clone stamp tool in photoshop to paint over those white areas with another part of your sky and blended it in. I then painted on just a very very slight amount of black to create detail where there wasn’t any.

I now was able to flatten the image and convert to a smart object and brought it into the camera raw filter to edit it normally. I used a graduated filter to edit the bottom half without changing the work I did to the top and gradually blend it into the frame.

Your histogram looked good so it’s not that there’s anything wrong with the light meter it’s just that in a shot like this it would be better to use spot metering or center weighted metering.

There also a setting in the camera setting which is called “overexposed.” This will show you on screen when there is a blown highlight by showing it as a black and white zebra stripe alerting you that you need to reduce your exposure so you don’t have this issue.

Thanks I'll give that a shot. I'll look for the "overexposed" setting and see if I can set my Shutter speed better. I have no problems using the clone tool for the sky, just feels like cheating or faking it.

 

[brett8883]

Thanks I'll give that a shot. I'll look for the "overexposed" setting and see if I can set my Shutter speed better. I have no problems using the clone tool for the sky, just feels like cheating or faking it.

I know what you mean I felt dirty doing it lol but that’s the only way to do it after the fact in that situation.

Also it occurred to me that in your third picture up there the HDR effect in Snapseed isn’t helping because it’s exaggerating that issue by adding an edge glow effect.

Yea set overexposed and it won’t bother you unless there’s something overexposed.

 

[run2jeepn]

Why would they be so uniformed and so evenly spaced? Even in area's where there are clouds and clearly not white (blown out)..

 

[Meta4]

Thanks I'll give that a shot. I'll look for the "overexposed" setting and see if I can set my Shutter speed better.

What you are looking for is the Overexposure Warning.

Do I need to manual take the Pictures or does the Mavic Save the individual pictures from the Pano for me? Because I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

I always shoot panoramas as individual images and create the panoramas at home in the computer but whatever works for you is OK.

 

[run2jeepn]

What you are looking for is the Overexposure Warning.

I always shoot panoramas as individual images and create the panoramas at home in the computer but whatever works for you is OK.

Thanks

Do you just take your best guess on what pictures to take for Panos? I can see take 180's Vertical and Horizontal wouldn't be hard, but 360's?

 

[brett8883]

What you are looking for is the Overexposure Warning.

I always shoot panoramas as individual images and create the panoramas at home in the computer but whatever works for you is OK.

I think he’s asking if when using the pano feature of DJI Go 4 to automatically take the pano shots does it save the images to the SD card as well. I believe it does but I wasn’t 100% sure I usually use Litchi to do that.

When you do it that way and save the RAW DNGs to the SD card and stitch them together later using Photoshop it will make that issue easy to solve as well because at least part of the circle issue is JPEG artifacts.

Another thing you could do if you are into panos is try doing an HDR pano. With HDR you’ll use the AEB camera settings to take bracketed exposures and then use camera Raws HDR pano feature to stitch together and layer the photos. It takes more time in post but you’ll never have to worry about not getting enough range.



This is an HDR pano I just did recently. I tried keeping it natural looking but I think you can still see that looking directly into the sun like that I wouldn’t have had the range of all the highlights and shadows in one frame had I not done it HDR.

 

[AMann]

I just noticed these yesterday. I was editing a pano on my phone with Snapseed and over did the Saturation a little, not a lot. I noticed a faint circular image in the sky. played with the image more and really over did the processing and you can see them spaced throughout the sky. It's not just in snapseed either. I edited a RAW file in Photoshop and still had an issue with it. What is causing this and how do I fix it?

Untouched
https://funkyimg.com/i/2TvyV.jpg

A little extra Saturation
[img]https://funkyimg.com/i/2TvyU.jpeg

WAY OVER DONE.. But done to just show the circles better...

Here is one I did last week. Used the Burn Tool on the sky. You can see the top half of one to the far left..

Do they also show up in a single frame in the same place all the time? If so, have you ever gotten your camera wet, even just a little?

 

[run2jeepn]

Do they also show up in a single frame in the same place all the time? If so, have you ever gotten your camera wet, even just a little?

No, Only in 360 Pano

 

[AMann]

No, Only in 360 Pano

Huh, are they always in the same spots on the image? I had to get my DSLR camera sensor remapped due to a few hot pixels, they’d always leave weird jpg artifacts on an image.in the same place, but it sounds like that’s not your issue.

 

[4wd]

Could be a spec of dust e.g. pollen on the sensor.
It's a common issue with SLR and shows up most with small aperture (High F number)

 

[Meta4]

Do you just take your best guess on what pictures to take for Panos? I can see take 180's Vertical and Horizontal wouldn't be hard, but 360's?

I shoot my panos manually because it's faster and easier for me than using apps and gives a lot more flexibility.
It's pretty simple to shoot, rotate the camera allowing an overlap, shoot, rotate etc.
It could be for a simple panorama like this:

To make this:

Or take a few shots like these (and a lot more):

To make a full 360 degree pano like this: Makarora River

Here's something I wrote that might give you some ideas on technique:

SkyPixel - Connecting Creativity

www.skypixel.com

 

[brett8883]

Why would they be so uniformed and so evenly spaced? Even in area's where there are clouds and clearly not white (blown out)..

if you look at your original those spots are very close to the white point and out of range of the camera with the current settings. They aren’t actually visible in the original it’s only when you try to darken the sky that you see them

 

[jzguitar]

It looks like dust on the sensor - I’ll see the same thing on my DSLR when shooting the sky with a higher f-stop. Take a shot of plain blue sky with your aperture around f8 or higher. Then open it on your computer and see if you notice any spots. Just a thought.

 

[AMann]

It looks like dust on the sensor - I’ll see the same thing on my DSLR when shooting the sky with a higher f-stop. Take a shot of plain blue sky with your aperture around f8 or higher. Then open it on your computer and see if you notice any spots. Just a thought.

I thought about that too, and you described a good test for it. If those marks appear on every photo, then you are right. I guess it could have been dust from when the camera was manufactured, because I assume the sensor is well sealed in behind the lens, and another filter in front of it in addition to the removable one.

 

[Drbobk]

I agree with the dust on the sensor idea. If you notice, the shapes are very similar for every other circle, leading me to believe that there might be two spots on the sensor. Notice the little peninsula at about 2 O'clock on the circles. But the circle in the center of the image I'm attaching looks more like the circle at the extreme left in your image (shown in a separate attachment. The peninsula is on the outer circle. t's on the inner circle on the others.
Then again, maybe some artifact of the software is creating it.

 

[JohnChap]

The problem is not an over-exposure one as suggested above, as the eight blobs are evenly spaced and about the same size. I'm guessing the pano is a stitch of 8 images. Dust on an CCD usually creates a much smaller 'blob' and it would be darker, however I suspect the artefact might be due to a residue of some sort on the CCD or a piece of dust on the inner surface (closest the CCD) of the lens. The trouble is that you cannot access either of those surfaces to clean them, maybe a DJI technician can?