Bussty Posted at 5-23 03:10
Do you know if the Mini 3 Pro locks exposure and white balance when it takes a 360 pano?

Hi Bussty,

I do not have the Mini 3 until now. And in the Mavic Air I didn't care because I always shot in RAW.

SPLflyer Posted at 5-23 03:16
Hi Bussty,

I do not have the Mini 3 until now. And in the Mavic Air I didn't care because I always shot in RAW.

Good point! Would certainly cover white balance but would be a pain having to manually adjust exposures off RAW if not consistent?

fredbotton75 Posted at 5-22 23:15
There are indeed some stitching errors on zenith in the assembled 360's using PTGui. 60° is not close enough to 90°, so there is some bit of material missing.

Correction is usually ok with PTgui (Pro version have an "automatic fill" option looking good, but I have the regular version), or using Photoshop. Works fine with skies, even cloudy ones.

Hi Fred

I got that cloud Pano to stitch perfectly in PTGUI expect for a very small hole at top (tiny) It said there were images without control points but I just went to the create tab and created anyway and was fine.

Such a nicer experience zooming in on those in a 3D viewer compared to the Mini 1 Panos...

SPLflyer Posted at 5-23 03:12
There is something coming from me too ;-)

I just experimented with the Pano 1 in PanoramaStudio 3 Pro. Without any preliminary work I imported the JPGs. PSP 3 does the white balance and exposure adjustments automatically. The following picture shows the program after importing the images. It is important to select the checked boxes under "Presets".

Looks perfect, at least we know the Mini 3 Pro camera can produce great 360 Panos, even if needing some manual intervention.

Bussty Posted at 5-23 03:31
Good point! Would certainly cover white balance but would be a pain having to manually adjust exposures off RAW if not consistent?

That is correct. I import the Air's 25 RAW images into Adobe Camera Raw, take an average image, and perform development on it. Then I apply the development data to all 25 images. If I then see that individual images are way too bright (against the sun) or way too dark (in the shadows), exposure adjustments are still made in Camera Raw only for those photos. Then all the images go into Photoshop, where they are refined.

PanoramaStudio then reliably calculates out any exposure differences that may still exist afterwards.

SPLflyer Posted at 5-23 04:26
That is correct. I import the Air's 25 RAW images into Adobe Camera Raw, take an average image, and perform development on it. Then I apply the development data to all 25 images. If I then see that individual images are way too bright (against the sun) or way too dark (in the shadows), exposure adjustments are still made in Camera Raw only for those photos. Then all the images go into Photoshop, where they are refined.

PanoramaStudio then reliably calculates out any exposure differences that may still exist afterwards.

That is dedication!

DJI Stephen Posted at 5-10 20:56
Hello there Kent360. Good day and thank you for reaching out. For additional reference the DJI Mini 3 Pro ( https://www.dji.com/mini-3-pro?site=brandsite&from=nav ) has a Pano Shooting Mode, you can choose from Sphere 180 degrees, Wide Angle and Vertical. Thank you.

Mini 3 Sphere is not complete sphere yet.
This needs to be fixed asap please see here:
https://forum.dji.com/forum.php? ... 303&pid=2751458

Well I can tell you that the air 2s takes great 360 sphere photos straight out of the drone. Only one time I had a small misalignment when very windy. Otherwise I can't see why dji don't correct this. It was part of the marketing of the mini 3 that it can do what larger drone can. But that doesn't seem to be the case.,,,,contrary dji this is not a cheap drone give the consumer what they paying for.

djiuser_co43r6PJI8ux Posted at 5-23 22:26
Well I can tell you that the air 2s takes great 360 sphere photos straight out of the drone. Only one time I had a small misalignment when very windy. Otherwise I can't see why dji don't correct this. It was part of the marketing of the mini 3 that it can do what larger drone can. But that doesn't seem to be the case.,,,,contrary dji this is not a cheap drone give the consumer what they paying for.

You obviously have not read what is spread out here in now 4-5 threads. It's not about the panos straight out of the drone, where (as with the Air 2s) much of the sky is faked with a muddy blue. It's about direct sky shots above 20° above the horizon that allow professional production of a complete sphere (look at the examples in post #49). This could be achieved by the Mini 3 for the first time, because it is the only drone that can tilt its gimbal up far enough.

tskdji Posted at 5-12 01:07
Hi, may I know how many photos are included in a 180 degree panorama taken by DJI Mini 3?

In Mini 2, the 180 degree panorama contains a row of 7 images only, which is no good. Air 2 is much more poweful to provide 3 rows of 7 images, totally 21.

Mini 3 does the 21 images.

alansimpsonweb.net Posted at 5-24 02:24
Mini 3 does the 21 images.

that is false. i looked into the panorama folder of my mini 3, and in every panorama folder (did spheres) there are 26 pictures, not 21.

I have made another test shot with additional images covering the 'upper' row which is not shot during the Sphere creation process. Resulting stitched (PtGui) image shows flaws in the sky what I would believe could be fault of uncorrected lens vignette from DNG source.
This is an issue because even if you manually add the images (annoying, boring) the resulting image is unusable without further processing. See below:

AVsupport Posted at 5-24 15:07
I have made another test shot with additional images covering the 'upper' row which is not shot during the Sphere creation process. Resulting stitched (PtGui) image shows flaws in the sky what I would believe could be fault of uncorrected lens vignette from DNG source.
This is an issue because even if you manually add the images (annoying, boring) the resulting image is unusable without further processing. See below:

Have you seen this?

https://ptgui.com/support.html#6_20

6.20. How can I correct a single image for vignetting in PTGui Pro?
First you need to determine the vignetting of your lens. To do so, take a small panorama (e.g. 3 images, each overlapping about 50%). The amount of vignetting depends on the aperture of the lens so this should be done for each aperture at which you intend to do vignetting correction. In this calibration project, go to the HDR/Exposure tab and press Optimize Now. Press the Save buttons below the vignetting curve and the camera response curve to save the curves to a file.

The actual vignetting correction can be done as follows:
Start a new PTGui Project
Load your source image. Note the lens projection that is chosen by PTGui (e.g. Rectilinear)
Switch to Advanced mode
Go to the HDR/Exposure tab and load the previously saved vignetting curve and camera curve.
Go to the Panorama Editor. Set the panorama projection identical to the lens projection (e.g. Rectilinear or Fisheye).
Press the Fit Panorama button
Choose the desired output format and press Create Panorama. PTGui may complain about missing control points; you can ignore this warning.
You can save the thus created project to a file and use it as a template for subsequent corrections: you will only need to start a new project, load the next source image and choose Apply Template.

It's possible to combine this process with barrel distortion correction, see Q6.14.

AVsupport Posted at 5-23 21:21
Mini 3 Sphere is not complete sphere yet.
This needs to be fixed asap please see here:
https://forum.dji.com/forum.php?mod=redirect&goto=findpost&ptid=265303&pid=2751458

Hi there AVsupport. Thank you for reaching out and for giving out these information. I will forward these information to the designated DJI department for attention. Thank you.

AVsupport Posted at 5-24 15:07
I have made another test shot with additional images covering the 'upper' row which is not shot during the Sphere creation process. Resulting stitched (PtGui) image shows flaws in the sky what I would believe could be fault of uncorrected lens vignette from DNG source.
This is an issue because even if you manually add the images (annoying, boring) the resulting image is unusable without further processing. See below:

Hi AVsupport,

I know PTgui only from comparative reviews. In general, the great performance is emphasized and the possibility to optimize many parameters manually (see Bussty's posting). But in one respect PTgui regularly performs worse than its competitor PanoramaStudio 3 Pro: in exposure compensation! Especially vignetting is very reliably corrected automatically by PSP 3. Also in the separate sky shots of fredbotton75 (Pano 1 from https://forum.dji.com/forum.php? ... 609&pid=2750649) you can see edge shading, but PSP 3 compensated for it without any problems: https://forum.dji.com/forum.php? ... 09&pid=2750817. Maybe you also try the test version of PSP 3. But it should not be concealed that PSP 3 had difficulties with the RAW development of the DNGs, at least with my Mavic Air. It is better to convert the DNGs to TIF beforehand.

I did a test with the mini 3 pro - in this case a virtual tour under and around a highway bridge. This is where yuu can see the spheres and how vital it would be to have a full sphere at the top  - i.e. for inspection tasks under a bridge.

The mini 3 pro camera would be able to do this easily with the new tilt up ability. just the software seems to be the old one from air 2 etc.

Have a look on this virtual tour of a bridge - all done with Mini 3 Pro spheres:
https://kuula.co/share/NHYx5/col ... =0&thumbs=1&inst=de

Thanks for your contributions, the issue is definitely less prevalent when shooting 2 additional rows at 45 deg horizontal each. Didn't have the same issues then.
I also noticed that there is a difference between the jpgs and the DNGs, as far as lens vignetting and distortion is concerned, the jpgs seem corrected; I checked in other software if such correction exists, but I cannot find any in either ON1 or CaptureOne22. And as said before, PTGui doesn't recognize it yet either.
Personally easiest would be to get DJI to release a lens profile for those DNGs and let PTGui implement that for the next update. Alternatively there's @Busty 's pathway as mentioned above, thanks!
Either way, we need another 2 rows shot above to make this work for full 360/180 spheres. Or one row portrait orientation might do it, perhaps.
FYI, I Also checked the Pano preset Vertical Pano: Also doesn't shoot a complete 180deg set of images..
Personally, For some projects I might be OK with DJI stitching the DNGs just like it does with the finished 'panorama' JPG, but it needs to have a proper sky and not just a washed out substitute, and it must be HDR with decent bit depth.

AVsupport Posted at 5-25 21:56
Thanks for your contributions, the issue is definitely less prevalent when shooting 2 additional rows at 45 deg horizontal each. Didn't have the same issues then.
I also noticed that there is a difference between the jpgs and the DNGs, as far as lens vignetting and distortion is concerned, the jpgs seem corrected; I checked in other software if such correction exists, but I cannot find any in either ON1 or CaptureOne22. And as said before, PTGui doesn't recognize it yet either.
Personally easiest would be to get DJI to release a lens profile for those DNGs and let PTGui implement that for the next update. Alternatively there's @Busty 's pathway as mentioned above, thanks!

as you can see in my example virtual tour, for some projects it is more then useful to have a real full sphere panorama. yeah, dji needs to fox this. it would be a stand alone USP of this drone. If they dont do it, competitors will soon.

AVsupport Posted at 5-24 15:07
I have made another test shot with additional images covering the 'upper' row which is not shot during the Sphere creation process. Resulting stitched (PtGui) image shows flaws in the sky what I would believe could be fault of uncorrected lens vignette from DNG source.
This is an issue because even if you manually add the images (annoying, boring) the resulting image is unusable without further processing. See below:

did you stitch the dngs directly or the jpgs from the dngs? because usually ptgui is good if it has enough reference points. it could be due to portrait/landscape profile of the pictures it has it difficult to identify enough control points.

sbonev Posted at 5-26 01:23
did you stitch the dngs directly or the jpgs from the dngs? because usually ptgui is good if it has enough reference points. it could be due to portrait/landscape profile of the pictures it has it difficult to identify enough control points.

DNG. DJI doesn't correct for vignetting when using DNG (but it should). Does with JPG.stitching is not really the issue. PTGui does a fine job. vignetting IS however. And not shooting a complete sphere.

Did you find this was best result or have you found something else?
Keen to know if your still using PanoramaStudio 3 Pro, SPLflyer or something else now?

obiebrown Posted at 2-25 17:35
Did you find this was best result or have you found something else?
Keen to know if your still using PanoramaStudio 3 Pro, SPLflyer or something else now?

What I said five posts above about PanoramaStudio 3 Pro in May 2022 is no longer true. The current version of the program can now process the DNGs of the Mini 3 Pro perfectly. During the direct import of the DNGs into PS3P (with the correct settings!) a complex brightness compensation takes place, which leaves nothing of the mentioned vignetting (by the way, it was this capability in particular that caused Bussty to switch from PTGui to PanoramaStudio 3 Pro recently!). How the results of the direct import of DNGs into PS3P can look like can be demonstrated very well by these examples https://www.skypixel.com/photo36 ... d-a353-1e5afe1cc8ba and https://www.skypixel.com/photo36 ... ht-northern-germany .

However, even better results can be obtained by having DxO PureRaw pre-process the DNGs. If you import the DNGs exported by DxO into PS3P, you also benefit from the excellent denoising done by the program. By the way, you can find a list of forum threads that have dealt with this topic since spring 2022 here: https://forum.dji.com/forum.php? ... 49&pid=2941120. In any case, you can't go wrong with the workflow DxO → PS3P (export to 16 bit TIFF) → finishing/retouching in Editor (Affinity, Photoshop etc.) (see examples on my Skypixel account).