Shooting Panoramic Photos with P4P, Advice?

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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.
 
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.
 
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
DJI_0550-604a-X3.jpg

DJI_0397-475%20detail-X3.jpg

DJI_0306-364b-X3.jpg
 
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!
 
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.
 
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.
 
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?
 
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
DJI_0550-604a-X3.jpg

DJI_0397-475%20detail-X3.jpg

DJI_0306-364b-X3.jpg
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).
 
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


frognerseter_stitch.png


Here is for reference a full resolution crop of a section

frognerseter_crop.png
 
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
DJI_0550-604a-X3.jpg

DJI_0397-475%20detail-X3.jpg

DJI_0306-364b-X3.jpg

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.

San Francisco Aerial Drone Photography Treasure Island - Niall David Photography-0265.JPG
 

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