I developed this entire workflow in order to retain as much of the raw data as possible so when you add the finishing touches to your shots it’s an image that the human brain has an easy way of understanding, not a flattened out sphere that you have to wrap your head around. Just keep in mind that the file is rather big and every new layer you add to it will make Photoshop react slower and slower. But before you do that make sure to save a copy of the file as it is the source for everything that you are going to create based on this panorama.Īfter you have distorted your image you can start adding in the color grade and any other edit you normally do to your photos. Now that you finally have an equirectangular image, you can put it back into Photoshop and use a little know plugin called Flexify 2 to distort it into a tiny planet, an Inception-like cityscape, a very wide-angle photo, or anything in between. Since Photoshop recently removed the ability to project panoramas to the sphere and edit them like that after adding some clouds to the photo, the best alternative is to open it in Affinity Photo and use their version of healing brush to hide any seams and warping we created in the process of creating some sky. Since drones are unable to point their gimble upwards the resulting panorama is not yet equirectangular (2:1 aspect ratio) so we will have to use tools like Content-Aware Fill to recreate some of the missing skies.
It’s an old software but it gets the job done impressively well and has more options than I usually need. My weapon of choice here is Kolor AutoPano. Just make sure to use a cylindrical projection and you should be fine as long as you stay away from anything made by Adobe and export your image back to 16-bit.
tiff files.įor stitching, you do have the option to pick between software like PTGui, Kolor AutoPano, Pano2VR, and I’m sure there are many more out there.
When you are done just export them as 16-bit. Keep an eye open on how the highlights look in the shoot that contains the sun and how the shadows look in the darkest one of the set. Adjust the light and colors as close to the final look that you are aiming for as you can without using any local adjustments, curves, or the color grading wheels, and sync those settings across all of the 26 photos. To prepare your photos for stitching now is the time to take advantage of all the information in those RAW files in Lightroom. DNG files on your hands to work with and transform while retaining as much quality as possible. Now the hard part begins! You got home and you have 26.
Auto because the entire scene always has so much light variation depending on where the camera is pointing that it would be impossible to not get pure whites/blacks on full manual mode. Also in my case, there is a lot of forest around me and the drone will try to overcompensate for how dark it is and give me blown-out skies, so AUTO and -0.7 EV is how I shoot these panoramas most of the time. It will take between 30 seconds and 1 minute depending on the lighting conditions.Ī good tip considering the limited dynamic range of this sensor is to shoot a bit underexposed so you avoid getting blown-out whites around the sun. Just make sure you don’t cut off anything like tree branches or mountain peaks on the upper limit of the gimble rotation and wait for the drone to finish shooting before you fly to the next location. It shoots RAW and has a function to shoot a 360-degree panorama automatically, the result of which will be 26 photos on your SD card.
The thing with the 360 photography space is that it evolved a lot around phone apps and there is not one software that would serve you well from start to finish, so I will try to guide you through a workflow I developed over time to obtain the highest quality final photos without losing data to JPEG exports and resizes.Īlthough it is tiny, the DJI Mini 2 has two key features for this.