Grumbleduke
lvl.1
Flight distance : 1824862 ft
United States
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I have been going pretty deep down this particular rabbit hole in the last couple of weeks and thought I'd share a little of what I've been doing.
Saw some pretty cool evening/night-time panoramas and decided to have a go myself. I've been taking photos for many years but I'm pretty new to drone photography and absolutely new to panoramas.
The 6 or so photos that went into this panorama were taken manually, using the DJI fly software and my Mavic mini (so .jpg only and no zoom or aperture adjustments possible. ISO set to 100.) I locked the exposure and took a series of photos, rotating the drone about 1/3 of the visible frame for each shot. Did this for several exposures: 1, 2 and 4 seconds. It was a calm evening and the drone made a remarkably steady platform for the long exposures.
Viewing the photos on a PC later, it became obvious that the 4 second exposures were all slightly blurred. This may have been due to over-exposure, slight movements of the drone or my impatience and failure to allow the drone time to settle down between shots. The 1 second exposures were too dark so I worked with the 2 second exposed photos. I had swept the camera through about 270 degrees, taking ten photos but decided about 140-degrees covered the most interesting view.
Autostitch is freeware. It's incredibly easy to use, will run from a memory stick or whatever folder it is unpacked to as it needs no complex installation. There are a few options but they don't affect output quality much. Just select the photos and it will stitch and blend them together, doing all the complicated stuff without input from the user. This is what the output looks like, with a small amount of crop and gamma adjustment:
I was fairly pleased with the results but the dynamic range is not so great. The highlights are blown out and the shadows are too dark. Starting with jpegs (as the mini doesn't save RAW files) there's not a lot of extra information to play with.
So... I took a deep breath and went a bit further down the rabbit hole.
Hugin is also freeware, with no ads or limitations. It does a whole lot of things that Autostitch doesn't. It gives options for many aspects of the input, processing and output. Most significantly, it can handle bracketed exposures. In theory, the best bracketed panoramas will come from a nice, neat situation where you take bracketed exposures which EXACTLY overlap (from a fixed tripod) creating "stacks" of images at different exposures which can be combined to give higher dynamic range images that can then be stitched together into a panorama. In this instance, I had taken three separate sweeps of the scene at each of the three exposures so I had no perfectly aligned stacks. Hugin recognized this situation (although it does check how you want it to try and process the images) but with otherwise mostly default settings, went on to create the following:
There's still room to improve on the exposure range and the slightly blurred 4 second exposure images affected overall sharpness but I'm overall excited with the results. I could not persuade Hugin not to crop out the pier in the foreground (I think I have figured that out since but will save that for another post.)
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