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.)

Another free stitching alternative is Microsoft ICE.

Very nice output!

I made several other panoramas, using the same manual approach - sweeping a scene with each of three bracketed exposures.  
Living in the flat-lands of South Louisiana, with lots of trees, locations where it's possible to properly see sunsets and sunrises actually at the horizon are few.  The Mavic Mini has therefore opened up a new world of possibilities.

This one was just two or three overlapping photos in a vertical orientation, each with three exposures - moving the gimbal up and down at each of the three fixed exposures.  The brightness range in this case was huge with exposures from 1/8000" to 1/240".  With hindsight, this photo could probably use some playing with brightness curves to deepen a few of the shadows.

DAFlys Posted at 12-15 01:17
Another free stitching alternative is Microsoft ICE.

Have you compared it to Hugin?  Easier to use?  Better output for certain scenarios?  Does it handle bracketed/stacked/HDR exposures?

Montfrooij Posted at 12-15 06:23
Very nice output!

Thank you!  

I'm having fun and learning a lot but it's all new.  Very open to constructive criticism.

Grumbleduke Posted at 12-15 07:21
Have you compared it to Hugin?  Easier to use?  Better output for certain scenarios?  Does it handle bracketed/stacked/HDR exposures?

It has a lot of features,  can even create a pano from a video.  One nice feature is the content aware fill that can fill gaps when sticking.  You can see more info about it here - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ ... e-composite-editor/

Heres a little demo of some of the features -

Grumbleduke Posted at 12-15 06:58
I made several other panoramas, using the same manual approach - sweeping a scene with each of three bracketed exposures.  
Living in the flat-lands of South Louisiana, locations where it's possible to properly see sunsets and sunrises are few.  The Mavic Mini has therefore opened up a new world of possibilities.

Very nice vertical Pano.   

Getting a little more ambitious with Hugin...  Here's a horizontal panorama, made up from about 30 photos.  This was about five (overlapping) frames wide and two high, at three fixed exposures from 1/40" to 1/2".  Still manually sweeping the camera between shots so no exactly stacked exposures.
I'm not overly excited with this one from an artistic perspective but the sititching worked well and I played around with some of the perspective and cropping controls in Hugin to try and understand it better.
This housing development is just a few blocks West from my house so while the rectangular pond is pretty ugly, it's a cool feature to have in aerial photos for great sunset reflections.

Grumbleduke Posted at 12-15 07:23
Thank you!  

I'm having fun and learning a lot but it's all new.  Very open to constructive criticism.

I like the panos so far!

I wanted to try working with stacked exposures but hovering the drone while I switch exposure settings over and over again seems like a pain in the ass.  I've downloaded and installed Lichi which I am playing about with to get both automatic panoramas and auto bracketing of exposures.  I'm also playing with some different projections to see what else can be accomplished in Hugin (still barely scratching the surface there, I think - but I am interested in playing with ICE too.)

This was near a friend's house, right around sunset.  I used Lichi to take a three-row 360-degree panorama at a fixed 1/240", then did it again at 1/15".  Once again, there were no aligned stacks but the photos were evenly spaced, making for an interesting effect.  Hugin stair-stepped the stitching all around the perimeter and I haven't yet figured out whether there are any changes to the alignment configuration I could make to prevent that.  Aligning and stitching 30+ photos into this projection took a while - Probably 10 minutes or so for each step.

Unintentional double-post.  Ignore.

Most recent panorama below.  I finally made full use of the Lichi features so the Mavic Mini would take stacked bracketed exposures (i.e. exactly overlapping images) and also did a complete 4-row, 13 column 360-degree panorama.  It took about 3 or 4 minutes to do the entire thing, automatically.  I fixed the exposure with the camera half across the horizon and bracketed it by 1.7 stops for exposures of 1/30", 1/100" and 1/320".
Once back at my PC, I deleted the mostly black, very under-exposed, images, leaving 106 to be processed by Hugin.  The first round of aligning, stitching and rendering took my laptop 6 or 7 hours.  I wasn't happy with the output which was blurred in many places and had a couple of noticeable dislocations.  So I borrowed a more powerful PC, which got the processing time down to about 80 minutes, allowing me to have several attempts.  The 11Kpix x 11Kpix 240Mb output from Hugin then had brightess curves tweaked in Gimp.

I'm pretty excited with this image.  If I get some time at the weekend, I might have another go at it with ICE - just to see what it can do.  ICE doesn't handle stacked exposures as far as I know so that will be another interesting challenge.

So I finally got around to playing with ICE.  It does not do stacked exposures but it aligns and stitches at least 10x faster than Hugin.  Here's the same panorama as above, processed in ICE:

Here's another 360-degree panorama I took yesterday over the Amite river, in S. Louisiana.  Here are 67 photos, taken using Lichi in stacks of 3 bracketed exposures of  1/640, 1/2000 and 1/6400.  I deleted a few of the very over-exposed and very under-exposed photos but let ICE have the rest, even though it is not supposed to handle stacking exposures.

This is the Transverse Mercator projection:


And here's the spherical projection: