Shooting Panoramic Photos with P4P, Advice?

[DroneOnNDP]

Hi all, searched far and wide in the forum and internets and not finding any really good info or tutorials on photographing panoramic images with P4P, specifically without the use of apps outside DJI GO 4 as I'm on a P4P+ with no access to 3rd party apps just yet (please hold the that's why I got a P4P comments because otherwise I love it)

I'm a full time commercial photog and am used to shooting panos for clients and personal work with my Nikon D810, and then post processing in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, so feel comfortable on the post processing end, just hoping for some best practices and tips for shooting panos with the P4P as I get acquainted.

A big drawback is contrary to shooting DSLR panos where in a single row capture, you typically shoot vertical images so you have more room top to bottom on your image - of course we can't do that with a P4P so have to stack and layer a row or two or three.

Anyone have a great manual pano workflow? Appreciate any help & advice! Thanks in advance.

 

[Tomas Wangen]

Hi all, searched far and wide in the forum and internets and not finding any really good info or tutorials on photographing panoramic images with P4P, specifically without the use of apps outside DJI GO 4 as I'm on a P4P+ with no access to 3rd party apps just yet (please hold the that's why I got a P4P comments because otherwise I love it)

I'm a full time commercial photog and am used to shooting panos for clients and personal work with my Nikon D810, and then post processing in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, so feel comfortable on the post processing end, just hoping for some best practices and tips for shooting panos with the P4P as I get acquainted.

A big drawback is contrary to shooting DSLR panos where in a single row capture, you typically shoot vertical images so you have more room top to bottom on your image - of course we can't do that with a P4P so have to stack and layer a row or two or three.

Anyone have a great manual pano workflow? Appreciate any help & advice! Thanks in advance.

You will not be able to automate the capture with the native app, but you could always try to manually follow the same strategies as for instance litchi uses:

Help - Litchi

A good overlap and manual exposure is probably a good start.

 

[DroneOnNDP]

Cool thanks @Tomas Wangen I appreciate the reply and link. I was just going to go with what I know on shooting panos and take it from there. Hopefully soon DJI will get these apps onto the P4P+ remote... asap hopefully actually.

 

[Moonfox]

Works quite well with LR.

 

[Meta4]

Hi all, searched far and wide in the forum and internets and not finding any really good info or tutorials on photographing panoramic images with P4P, specifically without the use of apps outside DJI GO 4 as I'm on a P4P+ with no access to 3rd party apps just yet (please hold the that's why I got a P4P comments because otherwise I love it)

Anyone have a great manual pano workflow? Appreciate any help & advice! Thanks in advance.

I love big-picture panoramas and shoot a lot of them.
Shooting panoramas manually with the Phantom is faster and easier than any automated "solution"
Here's a really basic description I wrote 2 years back:

The basics are pretty simple.
Just take a series with a decent overlap between all images and put them into the stitching software.
The P3 makes it easy with hands on the controller - click, turn, click, turn, click.
The big screen makes it easy to check your composition.
Then lots of practice to improve and keep looking for strong subjects and good lighting to make the big picture.​

Shooting a second (or third) row gives the panorama more depth.
Here are a couple of examples

 

[DroneOnNDP]

Cool thanks @Meta4 - sounds like a basic pano tutorial to me, appreciate you sharing Guess I was overthinking the aerial flying camera aspect of making the final image, just gotta get out and shoot 'em!

 

[Meta4]

Cool thanks @Meta4 - sounds like a basic pano tutorial to me, appreciate you sharing Guess I was overthinking the aerial flying camera aspect of making the final image, just gotta get out and shoot 'em!

You've got a lot of good panorama material there in the bay area.
I'd love to go back and shoot therewith the Phantom.

 

[DroneOnNDP]

You've got a lot of good panorama material there in the bay area.
I'd love to go back and shoot therewith the Phantom.

We sure do, and now that I'm finally 107 this week it opened up a whole other world I'm looking forward into diving into I have a number of pretty cool shoots coming up in wine country north of SF, can't wait to put the pano power to good use!

Nice portfolio btw @Meta4 - I enjoyed viewing your images.

 

[Moonfox]

I love big-picture panoramas and shoot a lot of them.
Shooting panoramas manually with the Phantom is faster and easier than any automated "solution"
Here's a really basic description I wrote 2 years back:

The basics are pretty simple.
Just take a series with a decent overlap between all images and put them into the stitching software.
The P3 makes it easy with hands on the controller - click, turn, click, turn, click.
The big screen makes it easy to check your composition.
Then lots of practice to improve and keep looking for strong subjects and good lighting to make the big picture.​

Shooting a second (or third) row gives the panorama more depth.

What stitching software do you use?

 

[CanadaGoose]

I love big-picture panoramas and shoot a lot of them.
Shooting panoramas manually with the Phantom is faster and easier than any automated "solution"
Here's a really basic description I wrote 2 years back:

The basics are pretty simple.
Just take a series with a decent overlap between all images and put them into the stitching software.
The P3 makes it easy with hands on the controller - click, turn, click, turn, click.
The big screen makes it easy to check your composition.
Then lots of practice to improve and keep looking for strong subjects and good lighting to make the big picture.​

Shooting a second (or third) row gives the panorama more depth.
Here are a couple of examples

Haha, I was going to add my 2c and then I saw your amazing images, I'll be quiet! What drone took your images?
Microsoft has a very easy to use free program called ICE (Image Composite Editor).

 

[HEMSPILOT]

P4P plus... controller has a mic in it, so why no audio with my videos? Anyone???

 

[DroneOnNDP]

P4P plus... controller has a mic in it, so why no audio with my videos? Anyone???

Off topic... but short answer it doesn't record audio for the videos. Suggest a forum/google search.

 

[Meta4]

What stitching software do you use?

Mostly Microsoft ICE these days.
It does most things well except sea horizons.

What drone took your images?

The first one is the new P4 pro and the others are the P3 Adv.

 

[Kev Bailey]

Can you not stitch the images together in photoshop?


Sent from my iPad using PhantomPilots

 

[DroneOnNDP]

Can you not stitch the images together in photoshop?


Sent from my iPad using PhantomPilots

Thx see OP, Q was more about the actual shooting process with drone vs DSLR and to get a sense of people's pano workflow. Got LR and PS covered yes am currently stitching in Photoshop. Thx!

 

[Meta4]

Can you not stitch the images together in photoshop?

You can if you want to ... but several dedicated programs are better.

 

[DroneOnNDP]

You can if you want to ... but several dedicated programs are better.

Which program(s) do you prefer besides Microsoft ICE (I'm on a Mac)? I've always relied on Photoshop.

 

[jvmoore1]

Which program(s) do you prefer besides Microsoft ICE (I'm on a Mac)? I've always relied on Photoshop.

I use Hugin for the Mac
Hugin Download


Sent from my iPhone using PhantomPilots

 

[Tomas Wangen]

Reviving a old thread here, but just tried Litchi and ICE and - after finding a working workflow - I was quite happy with the result below.

Workflow for this particular image (this took a few tries):

8x3 image capture, dng 3/2 format (Litchi 3 row capture)
Global adjustment in lightroom exported as high-quality, fullres jpeg
Compositing in ICE, spherical all auto, 1 degree pitch adjustment, auto-completion
Export as png
Final adjustments and crop in photoshop

Worth noting that importing the dngs directly in ICE results in a major resolution-loss and is not usable (4096 pixel width).

Going via jpeg resulted in a impressive 24576 x 9152 source

Here is for reference a full resolution crop of a section

 

[DroneOnNDP]

I love big-picture panoramas and shoot a lot of them.
Shooting panoramas manually with the Phantom is faster and easier than any automated "solution"
Here's a really basic description I wrote 2 years back:

The basics are pretty simple.
Just take a series with a decent overlap between all images and put them into the stitching software.
The P3 makes it easy with hands on the controller - click, turn, click, turn, click.
The big screen makes it easy to check your composition.
Then lots of practice to improve and keep looking for strong subjects and good lighting to make the big picture.​

Shooting a second (or third) row gives the panorama more depth.
Here are a couple of examples

Quick Q on these photos @Meta4 - are they just shot horizontally with your bird, or do you ever do rows & columns with your panos? Wish there was a way to shoot vertical images with P4P because it's so much better to shoot pano material vertically so you get more info top to bottom. I always feel stifled by only having the horizontal motion available and shooting tons of up down up down always messes me up and the resulting pano comes out crappy.

I recently got out on Treasure Island in SF, was pretty happy with this 15 image HDR Pano - 3 5-image HDRs across in the row Processed in Aurora HDR, pano auto-stitched in Photoshop.