![]() You can also set the drone’s camera to bracket, and take several images from each position. Flying your Drone to Capture the Panorama That gives you the best possible image data to work with, but of course takes much longer to do and process. If you’re not using a built-in Panorama mode, you have a couple options for flying your drone. Start at the Horizon (if there are interesting clouds or mountains, then you may want to start aimed even higher), 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 means about a dozen images around the horizon. Then move your gimbal down about 1/2 of a frame height, and repeat. Do this until you are looking straight down, and then take a couple images while rotating around that point (referred to as the nadir). If you want to have the drone do it for you (I love having my drone get a view of the surroundings while I stop 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 take long for it 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 you want to capture. You can even put a delay between shots if you’re otherwise pushing the performance of your drone or mobile device too hard. If you’ve shot RAW, you’ll need to process the images as a batch before you can stitch them. I’ve found Camera Raw in Photoshop or Lightroom a convenient way to do that. Typically you’ll want to use the same settings for all the images, to provide a consistent look. Stitching a panorama couldn’t be any simpler than Microsoft’s ICE makes it For maximum quality, save the results out as TIFF files, if your stitching software supports that otherwise as JPEGs. Quality stitching is the most-demanding part of the post-processing workflow. Fortunately, there are several really good tools available. One of the most impressive for its powerful simplicity is ICE ( Image Composite Editor) from Microsoft Research. ![]() You can almost always just throw your images at it and it will do a great job of organizing and stitching them. Unfortunately, the software doesn’t add all the metadata needed to correctly display in some sharing sites, and Microsoft has abandoned it, so if you use it you’ll probably need to add some metadata on your own. You can add your own metadata, but the process is a bit painful. Facebook provides some guidance, but it isn’t a particularly user-friendly set of guidelines. All in all, you’re probably better off working with a current application that has automatic support for the needed tags. ![]()
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