P4P Pano Mode Review | tl;dr I'm impressed

[DaRana]

Whoah, okay so I tried it yesterday. I've shot a lot of photospheres & in the end I always went back to shooting them by hand. Nothing else really worked, and they were always SLOW. Shooting by hand I could shoot a couple of panos with lots of overlap in a single battery using AEB mode.

So I was absolutely expecting the DJI app to be less than useful when I tried the new mode yesterday. Wow. So, not perfect, but pretty damned good and a huge upgrade over every app and handheld shooting even 95% of the time. Most importantly, it is FAST. The thing just whips around. I did not try forcing a slow shutter speed - I'd imagine we'll end up w/ drag going too low, because that sucker is hauling. I want to shoot a quick video of it doing a pano close to the ground.

Here's what I shot: Winter Sunrise
You'll see a bit of ghosting in a couple sections - see "THE BAD" below for the source.

THE GOOD

• Fast, shoots the whole sequence in a about a min, max. Maybe less. Yeah, averaged right about 1 minute +- 5 seconds for the six I shot. That's an order of magnitude faster than any other app in the past, and maybe twice that again.
• Consistent. I was as impressed with the consistency as the speed. I shot a few in a row w/ just changing shutter speeds (to make an HDR) and it was almost pixel consistent between the same exposures in sequence from shot to shot. While something like PTGUI doesn't necessarily need that, it makes it easier for sure.
• Perfect coverage, I had no gaps at all. I've had issues w/ gaps in some auto apps and tend to overlap extra shooting by hand b/c it's pretty easy to miss a shot.
• The <360 modes are nice, too. I shoot a ton of vertical panoramas so having the quick 3 shot vertical pano was nice. Same for the horizontal and equirectangular 180 degree coverage.
• Auto sorting each individual pano into its own folder on the card is also a nice touch. Saves a step when shooting a bunch of panoramas.

THE LESS THAN GOOD

• I'd love the option to use AEB shooting. Tough to shoot a 360 pano w/ the sun and not have some degree of bracketing to get a good consistent exposure, and using auto or Ap Priority can work but you're now trusting on the pano blending app to get it right.
• I don't really care but having it auto stitch in-app would be nice. Honestly, I didn't check to see if it did.
• I'd really like an option to shoot w/ a bit more overlap in particular when it comes to the horizon, e.g. between shooting level and aimed up, because...

THE BAD

• The upward aimed bits being so separated from the horizontal plane resulted in challenges stitching. Basically, since was shooting from a few hundred feet up and the land fell away in one direction a number of the shots ended up not being able to auto stitch since there was almost no horizon visible. I had to painstakingly go in and mark the stitch points on about half of the upward-aimed shots. I missed on a few just slightly and unfortunately ended up w/ some ghosting on a few shots. Didn't notice it until doing some additional editing on the pic and, well, I just left it for now. You'll see it in a few spots along the horizon line in the example above.

Overall, though, two thumbs up. A nice upgrade via firmware for an existing piece of kit is always welcomed.

 

[PaulSouthport]

Good assessment.
I tried out the various pano modes too. Pretty impressed with the speed compared to Litchi and the results are very usable too.

 

[kndll]

wish this was available for the standard

 

[DaRana]

Good assessment.
I tried out the various pano modes too. Pretty impressed with the speed compared to Litchi and the results are very usable too.

It sounds like maybe Litchi v2 has the same support for faster pano? I haven't tried it yet. Wouldn't surprise me if the pano mode was accessible via API now, though, and that Litchi used for the v2 update. Since the functionality was added via Firmware update it seems plausible

 

[PaulSouthport]

Could be right - I didn't try Litchi that flight - I'll try it next time out

 

[flyboy73]

Whoah, okay so I tried it yesterday. I've shot a lot of photospheres & in the end I always went back to shooting them by hand. Nothing else really worked, and they were always SLOW. Shooting by hand I could shoot a couple of panos with lots of overlap in a single battery using AEB mode.

So I was absolutely expecting the DJI app to be less than useful when I tried the new mode yesterday. Wow. So, not perfect, but pretty damned good and a huge upgrade over every app and handheld shooting even 95% of the time. Most importantly, it is FAST. The thing just whips around. I did not try forcing a slow shutter speed - I'd imagine we'll end up w/ drag going too low, because that sucker is hauling. I want to shoot a quick video of it doing a pano close to the ground.

Here's what I shot: Winter Sunrise
You'll see a bit of ghosting in a couple sections - see "THE BAD" below for the source.

THE GOOD

• Fast, shoots the whole sequence in a about a min, max. Maybe less. Yeah, averaged right about 1 minute +- 5 seconds for the six I shot. That's an order of magnitude faster than any other app in the past, and maybe twice that again.
• Consistent. I was as impressed with the consistency as the speed. I shot a few in a row w/ just changing shutter speeds (to make an HDR) and it was almost pixel consistent between the same exposures in sequence from shot to shot. While something like PTGUI doesn't necessarily need that, it makes it easier for sure.
• Perfect coverage, I had no gaps at all. I've had issues w/ gaps in some auto apps and tend to overlap extra shooting by hand b/c it's pretty easy to miss a shot.
• The <360 modes are nice, too. I shoot a ton of vertical panoramas so having the quick 3 shot vertical pano was nice. Same for the horizontal and equirectangular 180 degree coverage.
• Auto sorting each individual pano into its own folder on the card is also a nice touch. Saves a step when shooting a bunch of panoramas.

THE LESS THAN GOOD

• I'd love the option to use AEB shooting. Tough to shoot a 360 pano w/ the sun and not have some degree of bracketing to get a good consistent exposure, and using auto or Ap Priority can work but you're now trusting on the pano blending app to get it right.
• I don't really care but having it auto stitch in-app would be nice. Honestly, I didn't check to see if it did.
• I'd really like an option to shoot w/ a bit more overlap in particular when it comes to the horizon, e.g. between shooting level and aimed up, because...

THE BAD

• The upward aimed bits being so separated from the horizontal plane resulted in challenges stitching. Basically, since was shooting from a few hundred feet up and the land fell away in one direction a number of the shots ended up not being able to auto stitch since there was almost no horizon visible. I had to painstakingly go in and mark the stitch points on about half of the upward-aimed shots. I missed on a few just slightly and unfortunately ended up w/ some ghosting on a few shots. Didn't notice it until doing some additional editing on the pic and, well, I just left it for now. You'll see it in a few spots along the horizon line in the example above.

Overall, though, two thumbs up. A nice upgrade via firmware for an existing piece of kit is always welcomed.

Very nice. Just curious, are you using .JPG or RAW? Are you processing with PTGUI or Photoshop CC, or something else?

 

[DaRana]

Very nice. Just curious, are you using .JPG or RAW? Are you processing with PTGUI or Photoshop CC, or something else?

Good questions, thanks for the reminder, I forgot to share those bits. Here's probably a lot more info than you thought you were asking for.

I didn't check deeply into the settings, but when I used the pano mode it automatically saved JPG + RAW. I didn't see any option to change that. I always shoot w/ RAW normally, and all of the processing was done w/ RAW.

Basic workflow is to ingest off the card into Lightroom. Normally I strip the embedded profiles off the card as part of ingest (Using a powershell script I've shared on GitHub). However, the script broke from the change in the folder structure with the Panos, so they retained the embedded profile.

For the 3 shot vertical and 9 shot rectilinear panos, I was able to successfully create a merged DNG right in Lightroom, which is convenient since we're staying in RAW. If you don't know, the latest version of Lightroom now supports truly queuing HDR and Pano Merge tasks. Just hit CTRL+SHIFT+H or CTRL+SHIFT+M with the images (or a collapsed stack) selected and it will queue up and perform a background HDR/Pano merge using the last UI settings without bringing LR to its knees like this would have done in the past. I tried multiple ways but was not able to get this to work with the 21 shot version, it just couldn't quite connect it - back to my point on wishing we could define a touch more overlap. It might work in some circumstances, but it may just be a bit too wide for the built-in LR options.

For the 21 shot, then, and full photosphere, these were RAW developed in LR, exported to TIFF, then processed with PTGUI. I may have forgotten to mention that the full photosphere linked above is an HDR. The automatic pano was solid enough that I ran three consecutive 34-shot panos at -2/0/+2. In addition, due to the consistency it was easy to add some grad filters in Lightroom and sync them across the multiple exposures at the same gimbal pitch. e.g. 1/3 of the images are at exactly gimbal pitch 0 degrees, so I tossed a grad filter to bring out the clouds a touch in raw development in LR and auto-synced that across all 11 of the 0 pitch shots. When shooting a pano manually like this I end up too inconsistent to do this easily.

For the PTGUI processing, as noted I had to do some manual work adding in some points to match. In the end I ended up just deleting a few pics, which in hindsight I should have just done in the first place, as it was the overly bright pics, for example, where the sky was blown out, where I had a hard time matching up the 20 pixels of horizon visible on the bottom. Either that or just masked out the bottom, but again, I was at "I have spent enough time on this" point. FWIW I've learned that with PTGUI and a full photosphere do the tone mapping within PTGUI because it is smart enough to ensure that the two sides match up so you don't get a seam. Normally I'd export LDR layers and tone map in Photomatix for greater control, but, once you play with it a bit, PTGUI tone-mapping isn't bad for photorealistic output. Just don't use the defaults. The seam that IS visible is from the last step, which is doing final edits/tweaks in Photoshop CC. I'll usually content-aware fill in the sky, still need to come up w/ a good technique to do so and avoid a seam like I got.

Aaaanyways, there ya go.

 

[flyboy73]

That is very helpful. I must admit that while I have PTGUI I have not used it much as I found the merge of Photoshop CC to be quicker and gave me better results. Perhaps if I spent more time with PTGUI I might be more comfortable with it. I'm wondering if you have used the merge capabilities of ACR or Photoshop CC? I never bothered to learn Lightroom when it came out and I'm too old now.

 

[vphagura]

I'm pretty new to the P4P just got it few wks ago but could not fly too much because of the rain and winter weather.
This Pano mode must be the new firmware upgrade because when I looked last time at my app it did not support it. Maybe I'll upgrade my firmware today.

 

[DaRana]

That is very helpful. I must admit that while I have PTGUI I have not used it much as I found the merge of Photoshop CC to be quicker and gave me better results. Perhaps if I spent more time with PTGUI I might be more comfortable with it. I'm wondering if you have used the merge capabilities of ACR or Photoshop CC? I never bothered to learn Lightroom when it came out and I'm too old now.

Never too old to learn new tricks! Just think of a new tool as just a new toy to play with.

As far as tools/techniques, I've tried, well, probably all of them. Actually I may never have used ACR merge but typically ACR and Lightroom develop module are effectively the same under the hood.

I should throw a conditional in here - Anything I'm noting above/below is assuming that you're trying to create something with the highest quality possible with little-to-no trade-off in terms of processing time. Sometimes you just want to shoot a quick shot and not have to worry about 4 hours of post-processing, and in such a case shooting JPG and having an auto-stitch is great! It's like shooting a pic on your phone - quite often that is "good enough." Anyways, just wanted to throw that conditional out there! Don't want anything to be misinterpreted as being preachy or "though shalt shoot RAW" preachy.

For non-360 panoramas, the DNG merge would be my first choice as staying in RAW as long as possible leaves the most flexibility. And it is fastest and easiest. You can do this, I think, in ACR? I am not certain. Definitely in Lightroom, though. Which is, really, not too big of a hurdle if you're already an Adobe user! I'm probably a bit biased b/c I've been using LR since 1.0 and have taught classes on it, but I find it far more straightforward than using ACR. Once it "clicks" there's usually no going back.

Anyways, once you render to TIF/JPG you're reducing your options b/c you're discarding data. That might be fine if you have perfect shooting conditions and perfect exposure, but that's rarely the case. Similarly why I export to TIFF when I have the time to do so as an intermediate step.

Photoshop merge is fine, it works well enough and I'll still use it occasionally for certain use cases. That was my go-to tool for plenty of years when I used to shoot more of a one-off panorama here and there. I originally invested in PTGUI because I started shooting more commercial architectural stuff on the ground, but found it to be great from the air, too. In particular for me is its ability to layer multiple exposures, greatly speeding up the process of shooting an HDR panorama. Also its ability to do batch jobs, that was the key for the commercial work and I use it all the time. The auto-folder saving output of the P4P is great for this, as you can just point the PTGUI batch builder at the parent folder and tell it to make a batch job for each subfolder. But PTGUI does need some time commitment to really get ahold of its intricacies - and I say that as someone who typically finds software pretty easy. Perfect GUI and UX is nice, but there are some tools that are just a lot more powerful and there are going to be a lot of gears and levers no matter what.

Now you've got me thinking of maybe throwing together a few blog posts and/or videos on some of these tools and workflows. Let's just say what I've described here is just the tip of my workflow geekery. Be curious if that would be of interest @flyboy73 ?

 

[DaRana]

I'm pretty new to the P4P just got it few wks ago but could not fly too much because of the rain and winter weather.
This Pano mode must be the new firmware upgrade because when I looked last time at my app it did not support it. Maybe I'll upgrade my firmware today.

It is indeed brand new w/ the new firmware that just came out.

 

[vphagura]

Thank you for your response and a lovely review of this feature.

 

[vphagura]

Looks like I have the firmware on my P4P as 1.05.0300 and this is the latest as the DJI Go app is telling me. But I do not see the option anywhere on the DJI Go App to take Pano. I may be missing something here.

 

[DaRana]

Looks like I have the firmware on my P4P as 1.05.0300 and this is the latest as the DJI Go app is telling me. But I do not see the option anywhere on the DJI Go App to take Pano. I may be missing something here.

It's actually a little tricksy. It isn't a "Flight Mode" it is actually a "Shooting Mode." i.e. you'll find it in the same place as you find "AEB" or "HDR" shooting modes.

Go to-

1. Camera Settings
2. Camera icon tab
3. Photo type
4. Choose Pano and select type

 

[vphagura]

Ah! Got it...thanks for the explanation.

 

[DaRana]

Ah! Got it...thanks for the explanation.

Welcome! Have fun.

 

[ETC]

Good assessment.
I tried out the various pano modes too. Pretty impressed with the speed compared to Litchi and the results are very usable too.

I tried and used both and find while dji is faster the litchi does a much better job. I will take the time over loss of quality.

 

[DaRana]

I tried and used both and find while dji is faster the litchi does a much better job. I will take the time over loss of quality.

Just a note that I believe Paul was referring to Litchi prior to the v2 update that added support for the (I assume) new firmware panorama. I have not tested Litchi w/ the new Pano mode there, yet (it's been 40+mph winds & rainy/snowy/icy here in the northeast!) but if it is as much faster than the old version it will be a great option to have in the toolbox.

 

[ravedog]

One note about viewing the image on the iPhone. I was able to just use the accelerometers and gyros to pan around and look down. That is awesome!

 

[Russ43Phantom]

I couldn’t help but to try to test the pano capability. Below is the result from using the DJI pano mode combined with Lightroom for stitching. This was particularly hard to do since the left and the right 90° angle shots were very close in subjects which would usually cause major distortions as you look up to see the trees bending inward. I would give DJI an Adobe in A-plus in this capability.