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Drone panorama examples

We've go used to shooting panoramas with convenient preset modes on our phones and cameras, but the unique perspective from a drone adds a vertical dimension that can create some impressive bird's-eye views. However, this also complicates the process of capturing, processing, and sharing images. We'll walk you through how to exercise it and the tools you'll need. For illustration we'll apply my favorite DJI Mavic Pro, merely the process is very similar for other prosumer drones.

Capturing 360-caste Panoramas with your Drone

For starters, you lot'll want to optimize your drone'southward photographic camera settings. Utilise as depression an ISO as you can that still allows you plenty shutter speed to reduce or eliminate motion blur from the scene. For landscapes I've establish speeds as low as 1/lx of a second work fine. If you are shooting in brilliant light, information technology is also worth seeing if adding a Circular Polarizing filter like those from PolarPro gives you an improved look (a CPL will filter out a lot of reflected light, and will often warm up an image shot under bright light conditions). I utilise PolarPro filters because they are light plenty non to impairment the drone's gimbal, merely withal pretty rugged.

This 360-degree panorama of Red Rock Canyon was shot using a Mavic Pro, Litchi flight app, and the workflow described in this article (click to navigate):

Just as smartphones have added Panorama modes, drone makers have been adding automatic 360-degree Panorama modes. DJI, for example, has added a ane-click Panorama option to the latest versions of its DJI GO application. The new mode allows your supported drone to take a pre-divers series of shots and stitches them for you. If you want a quick style to get a reasonable capture, this is ideal. It has four modes, with Sphere being the one to utilise to create a 360-degree image. Sphere mode captures 34 images and automatically stitches them for you into a composite JPEG.

As with well-nigh any photography, you tin get the best quality from your drone's photographic camera past shooting in RAW mode. For the Mavic Pro, that means 12MP DNG files. 1 cool trick with DJI's Pano mode is that if you set your photographic camera to RAW before using it, you'll become both a stitched JPEG and all the initial RAW files that y'all can process yourself later.

Setting your Exposure is probably the trickiest function of setting upwards your camera. Ideally for shooting a panorama you want to pick a single exposure that will encompass the important elements of the unabridged scene and so lock information technology in using Transmission. However, with the limited dynamic range of prosumer drone cameras, there often isn't a single Exposure setting that will piece of work in all directions. In that example I've had surprisingly good success leaving the Exposure on Motorcar and letting the mail service-processing software deal with stitching. Yous can too set the drone'south camera to bracket, and take several images from each position. That gives you the best possible image information to work with, but of course takes much longer to practice and process.

Flying your Drone to Capture the Panorama

If you're not using a built-in Panorama manner, you have a couple options for flying your drone. The kickoff is to manually  fly it. Start at the Horizon (if there are interesting clouds or mountains, and then you may want to showtime aimed even college), and capture images at intervals around a full circle. For all-time results you want around a fifty% overlap between images. For the Mavic Pro that means about a dozen images effectually the horizon. So move your gimbal down about 1/2 of a frame height, and repeat. Exercise this until you are looking direct downwards, and then take a couple images while rotating effectually that point (referred to as the nadir). Then you're all set up!

This panorama of the Shan Land countryside in Myanmar was not only fun to capture, but generated a lot of curiosity among the locals. One farmer offered to merchandise us his crop of chili peppers for my Mavic Pro (click to navigate):

If you lot want to accept the drone do it for you (I love having my drone get a view of the surroundings while I finish and eat my lunch while traveling, for example), then you can use an app that supports programmed Panoramas. My favorite is Litchi, which is available for both Android and iOS. It isn't free, but it doesn't have long for it to pay for itself. Within Litchi you can set where yous want to start, how many images yous want on each row, and how many rows you lot desire to capture. You lot tin even put a delay betwixt shots if you're otherwise pushing the performance of your drone or mobile device too hard.

Post-processing your Drone Images

If you've shot RAW, you'll need to process the images every bit a batch earlier you can stitch them. I've found Photographic camera Raw in Photoshop or Lightroom a convenient way to do that. Typically you'll desire to employ the aforementioned settings for all the images, to provide a consistent look. For maximum quality, salve the results out as TIFF files, if your stitching software supports that; otherwise as JPEGs.

Stitching a panorama couldn't be any simpler than Microsoft's ICE makes it

Stitching a panorama couldn't exist any simpler than Microsoft'south Water ice makes it

Quality stitching is the most-demanding part of the post-processing workflow. Fortunately, there are several really adept tools available. 1 of the most impressive for its powerful simplicity is ICE (Prototype Composite Editor) from Microsoft Research. You tin almost ever just throw your images at information technology and information technology will do a keen job of organizing and stitching them. Unfortunately, the software doesn't add all the metadata needed to correctly brandish in some sharing sites, and Microsoft has abandoned it, so if you use it you'll probably need to add some metadata on your ain.

You tin can add together your own metadata, but the process is a bit painful. Facebook provides some guidance, only it isn't a particularly convenient set of guidelines. All in all, you're probably better off working with a current application that has automated support for the needed tags. I've also stopped cropping my panoramas, every bit it makes the metadata more than complex, and the only downside is some blackness surface area (or perchance artificially filled in blue area) above the horizon.

Panorama Stitching using Hugin

Ptgui is a paid application that is quite pop, simply I've institute Hugin, a costless alternative, to be an excellent option. It isn't the most obvious to use, but it does have an "Assistant" interface that will walk you through the steps (in the new 2018 version this is called up by selecting Interface->Simple). Outset, you Load your images past dragging or using File Open. Hugin accepts either JPEGs or TIFFs, so information technology is quite flexible. You will need to fill up in the focal length for your drone. For the Mavic Pro it is 28mm.

When you first load your images into Hugin they're a jumble, but the software will sort them out if there is enough overlap

When y'all start load your images into Hugin they're a jumble, but the software will sort them out if there is enough overlap

Once yous're in the Banana interface, yous tin simply click on Step 2, "Align…" Hugin fires up a background chore that will endeavor to align and stitch the images using command points it identifies in their overlap. If all goes well, y'all tin simply correct the horizon past dragging it up and down in the Layout view. Hugin will also bear witness y'all all the connections it has made betwixt images. If you see gray lines then it couldn't connect some images. You lot tin fix that past clicking on the Link and and so identifying corresponding points between the images that Hugin can apply.

You can see some gray lines here showing that Hugin couldn't find corresponding points. We can add them manually if needed

You lot tin can encounter some gray lines here showing that Hugin couldn't find corresponding points. Nosotros can add them manually if needed

Sharing your 360-degree Panoramas

Facebook is most people's beginning target for sharing photos, and 360-degree photos are no exception. Facebook has made the process adequately easy as long as your image covers the full 360-degrees x 180-degrees, has the right metadata, and isn't over 10,000 pixels wide. You simply upload it like any other photo and Facebook marks information technology as 360 and allows users to rotate through it using their mouse or past moving their mobile device. YouTube doesn't currently back up 360-degree photos (although it does for video), simply Google's Street View does.

Unfortunately, SmugMug, my favorite photo-sharing site, doesn't support 360-caste photos, so I had to look elsewhere for a quality hosting experience. So far Kuula.co has fit the pecker. Their free subscription provides enough features for most users, and they take some really dainty viewing tools. Kuula also assumes all uploaded images are panoramas, so for full spherical panoramas (360 x 180) you don't even demand any additional metadata. Kuula also supports the oddly-popular Tiny Planet view of your spherical panoramas. Finally, Kuula supports college-resolution panoramas. up to xvi,384 pixels beyond — nigh double what you can upload to Facebook. Their Pro plans, starting at $8 per month, allow some advanced features like Virtual Tours and Batch Uploading.

The Best Things about Drone Panoramas

Producing quality drone video takes a lot of piece of work and background research on your location. But drone panoramas are easy to shoot, can be done anywhere, and when automated don't require any transmission intervention. You don't fifty-fifty have to venture far from your takeoff point to capture one. Often merely ascending is enough. That's about as safe as drone flying gets. Make sure and do some experiments to run across what heights work best for you lot. I tend to similar 150-200 feet for most situations. Too much higher and you lose detail on the basis. Withal, if you lot've got tall buildings or mountains in the altitude, like in the image of Carmine Rock Canyon in this article, being college tin can assistance capture them.

Now read: Best Drone Picks for Whatever Upkeep