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Drone panorama examples

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

Capturing 360-degree Panoramas with your Drone

For starters, yous'll want to optimize your drone's photographic camera settings. Use as low an ISO as you can that still allows you enough shutter speed to reduce or eliminate movement blur from the scene. For landscapes I've found speeds as low as 1/60 of a 2d piece of work fine. If yous are shooting in bright calorie-free, it is also worth seeing if adding a Circular Polarizing filter similar those from PolarPro gives yous an improved expect (a CPL will filter out a lot of reflected calorie-free, and will often warm up an image shot under bright light weather). I use PolarPro filters considering they are light enough not to damage the drone's gimbal, but even so pretty rugged.

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

Only as smartphones take added Panorama modes, drone makers have been calculation automated 360-degree Panorama modes. DJI, for case, has added a 1-click Panorama option to the latest versions of its DJI GO application. The new way allows your supported drone to take a pre-defined series of shots and stitches them for y'all. If yous desire a quick way to become a reasonable capture, this is ideal. It has iv modes, with Sphere existence the one to use to create a 360-degree image. Sphere way captures 34 images and automatically stitches them for you into a composite JPEG.

As with almost any photography, you tin can get the best quality from your drone's camera past shooting in RAW mode. For the Mavic Pro, that ways 12MP DNG files. One absurd trick with DJI's Pano mode is that if you prepare your camera to RAW before using information technology, yous'll get both a stitched JPEG and all the initial RAW files that you lot can process yourself afterward.

Setting your Exposure is probably the trickiest function of setting up your camera. Ideally for shooting a panorama you want to pick a unmarried exposure that will cover the important elements of the entire scene and so lock it in using Transmission. However, with the limited dynamic range of prosumer drone cameras, there often isn't a unmarried Exposure setting that volition piece of work in all directions. In that case I've had surprisingly good success leaving the Exposure on Motorcar and letting the post-processing software deal with stitching. You tin also set the drone's camera to bracket, and take several images from each position. That gives you the best possible image data to work with, but of grade takes much longer to do and process.

Flying your Drone to Capture the Panorama

If you're not using a born Panorama mode, y'all have a couple options for flying your drone. The first is to manually  fly it. Get-go at the Horizon (if there are interesting clouds or mountains, then you may desire to starting time aimed even college), and capture images at intervals around a full circle. For best results you want around a 50% overlap between images. For the Mavic Pro that ways well-nigh a dozen images around the horizon. And so move your gimbal downward near one/2 of a frame height, and echo. Do this until you are looking directly down, and so take a couple images while rotating around that betoken (referred to as the nadir). And so you're all set!

This panorama of the Shan State countryside in Myanmar was not only fun to capture, simply generated a lot of marvel among the locals. Ane farmer offered to merchandise usa his crop of chili peppers for my Mavic Pro (click to navigate):

If you want to accept the drone do it for you (I honey having my drone become a view of the environment while I stop and consume my lunch while traveling, for instance), and so you tin can employ an app that supports programmed Panoramas. My favorite is Litchi, which is available for both Android and iOS. It isn't free, but information technology doesn't take long for information technology to pay for itself. Within Litchi you can set where you want to start, how many images you want on each row, and how many rows y'all want to capture. You tin fifty-fifty put a delay between shots if you're otherwise pushing the performance of your drone or mobile device too hard.

Mail-processing your Drone Images

If you lot've shot RAW, y'all'll demand to process the images equally a batch before you can stitch them. I've constitute Camera Raw in Photoshop or Lightroom a user-friendly way to do that. Typically you'll want to use the same 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 be any simpler than Microsoft's Ice makes information technology

Quality stitching is the most-demanding part of the postal service-processing workflow. Fortunately, there are several really good tools available. Ane of the virtually impressive for its powerful simplicity is Ice (Image Composite Editor) from Microsoft Research. You tin almost always merely throw your images at it and it volition exercise a slap-up chore of organizing and stitching them. Unfortunately, the software doesn't add together all the metadata needed to correctly display in some sharing sites, and Microsoft has abandoned it, and so if you employ it yous'll probably demand to add some metadata on your own.

You can add together your own metadata, simply the procedure is a chip painful. Facebook provides some guidance, just it isn't a peculiarly user-friendly prepare of guidelines. All in all, y'all're probably ameliorate off working with a current application that has automatic support for the needed tags. I've too stopped cropping my panoramas, as it makes the metadata more complex, and the only downside is some black area (or perhaps artificially filled in blue area) above the horizon.

Panorama Stitching using Hugin

Ptgui is a paid awarding that is quite popular, just I've found Hugin, a free culling, to exist an fantabulous option. Information technology isn't the most obvious to use, merely it does accept an "Assistant" interface that volition walk you lot through the steps (in the new 2022 version this is called upwardly past selecting Interface->Uncomplicated). First, you Load your images past dragging or using File Open. Hugin accepts either JPEGs or TIFFs, so it is quite flexible. You will need to make full 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 kickoff load your images into Hugin they're a jumble, but the software will sort them out if there is enough overlap

One time you're in the Assistant interface, you can merely click on Step 2, "Marshal…" Hugin fires upward a background task that volition effort to align and sew the images using control points it identifies in their overlap. If all goes well, you can only correct the horizon past dragging it up and downwardly in the Layout view. Hugin will likewise evidence y'all all the connections it has made between images. If you lot see gray lines then it couldn't connect some images. You tin fix that past clicking on the Link and and so identifying corresponding points between the images that Hugin can employ.

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

You can see some gray lines hither showing that Hugin couldn't discover respective points. We tin can add them manually if needed

Sharing your 360-degree Panoramas

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

Unfortunately, SmugMug, my favorite photo-sharing site, doesn't support 360-degree photos, so I had to look elsewhere for a quality hosting experience. Then far Kuula.co has fit the bill. Their free subscription provides plenty features for most users, and they have some actually overnice viewing tools. Kuula likewise assumes all uploaded images are panoramas, so for full spherical panoramas (360 ten 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 higher-resolution panoramas. up to 16,384 pixels beyond — nearly double what you can upload to Facebook. Their Pro plans, starting at $8 per month, allow some advanced features similar Virtual Tours and Batch Uploading.

The Best Things about Drone Panoramas

Producing quality drone video takes a lot of work and background research on your location. But drone panoramas are easy to shoot, can exist washed anywhere, and when automated don't require any manual intervention. You don't fifty-fifty have to venture far from your takeoff betoken to capture ane. Ofttimes just ascending is enough. That's about as safe as drone flying gets. Make sure and do some experiments to see what heights work best for y'all. I tend to similar 150-200 feet for most situations. Too much higher and y'all lose detail on the ground. Notwithstanding, if you lot've got alpine buildings or mountains in the altitude, similar in the image of Red Rock Canyon in this commodity, being higher can help capture them.

Now read: All-time Drone Picks for Any Budget