today I'll show you how to get better panoramas out of your quadcopter in the
last few years quad copters have come on a long way with the panorama feature
built into the quadcopter it's great because it'll actually stitch these
image together and give you a JPEG final panoramic view it actually means you can
get closer to the subject and then shoot a wider shot to get everything in this
actually gives you a higher megapixel count for the shot getting more detail
and more quality in the shot now the panorama feature in the camera does
produce a stitched image but it's only a JPEG sometimes the image that the camera
stitches together are really good other times it misses the mark or it
doesn't quite get the exposure or the sky right when this is the case there
are things that you can do to produce better panoramas the first thing you
need to do is to switch on this function which saves the individual files that it
takes before stitching the panorama together it will actually save them in a
different file but they'll all be there on your SD card so this is what I do to
get a good panorama set the camera to raw switch on save individual files I
always shoot in manual mode with the highlight warning switched on once I
find a subject that would really suit a panoramic image I'll fly the drone into
position and then start the automatic panorama sequence go to advanced camera
settings go to camera picture and select pan oh you have three options I usually
choose 180 as the results from the 360 tend to be a little bit mixed then point
the camera at the middle of the subject and press the shutter button then wait
for it to complete the procedure once it's completed the procedure what you'll
find is it'll Stitch the image together in a JPEG as long as you have set
individual file switched on you'll have all of the individual photos that the
camera took once you're back at home and you've uploaded all of the images to
your computer this is where you need Lightroom or a similar program to stitch
them all together in to a panorama if you don't have
Lightroom I've put a link in the description below this will take you to
a free 30-day trial once you've put the SD card into your SD card reader click
on it and open up the file you'll have a DCIM file then you'll have the media
file this has all the raw files and the JPEG images that the drone creates
however the individual panorama files will be in this panorama folder you can
see it puts each panorama sequence into its own individual folder this is great
because you don't have to hunt around for them or have them lost amongst other
images as you can see it's taken each shot in the panorama next you want to
copy these panorama files to your hard drive I'm just going to drag them to the
desktop for now for this example if you're not sure how to store your files
click on the I in the corner this will take you to another of my videos showing
you how to do this next open Lightroom you want to import
your files so click on file and then import photos and video then find the
location where you copied them to obviously I copied them to my desktop so
I'll just find the folder and then click on import it may take a while for them
to import depending on how fast your system is so this might be a time to go
and grab yourself a cup of tea once you've imported all of your images
select them all then right-click select merge and panorama then you just have to
let the computer do its thing if your system is quite old it may take a while
but let it process the image and then it'll come up with a preview
once it's merged the image you'll have three projection options spherical
cylindrical and perspective generally with panoramas from a drone spherical or
cylindrical will work best also you have this boundary warp slider you basically
want the horizon to be as flat as possible and this is where you can
change that I keep auto crop switched on and auto
settings switched off then I'll click on merge once the process is finished
you'll see that Lightroom will create a whole new image so you'll still have the
raw individual files and also this new raw panorama with this complete stitch
you can see there is still a bit of distortion down here in the right-hand
corner so I'm going to click on the crop tool I'm going to change the aspect
ratio to 17 to 6 this is normally a really good aspect ratio for a panorama
so just grab the tab in the corner and reframe it it's going to keep the 17 to
6 aspect ratio I'll just frame it how I want it
I was thinking I'll keep the mountain in the middle I might have a look at it
off-center but actually it works better with a
mountain in the middle then I'll double click on the image to come out of the
crop tool I could have got a photo like this with a normal framing by moving the
drone further back and then cropping in afterwards but then the resolution would
have been a lot lower you can see this one is over 9000 by 3000 pixels so it's
a very big image next I'm going to edit the photo as normal if you're not sure
how to edit in Lightroom click on the I in the corner or the link in the
description to my editing Lightroom video once you get it to where you want
it it's time to export the image click on file and export then you'll have this
menu come up I'll choose folder later then give it a custom name I'm just
gonna call this one panorama desert as I'm just exporting for the web I'll
resize to fit and I'll change this one to 4,000 pixels along the long edge I'll
click on export and I'll choose a location where to put it for this
example I'm gonna put it on my desktop once again after exporting this image I
wasn't really happy with the aspect ratio so I went back into Lightroom and
changed the aspect ratio once again giving me this slightly smaller panorama
this is the beauty with Lightroom you can chop and change the settings around
it'll keep the original file so if you don't like a file that you've exported
you can go back into Lightroom change it and export it once again now if we look
at the final images I have the DJI JPEG image it's 4.2 megabytes it has an
approximate dimension of 6,000 by 2000 and the resolution is 72 dots per inch
with the raw file that I created even though I've cropped in on it I can still
export an image over 9000 by 5000 pixels also I could export it at 2
forty dots per inch which would mean it'd be suitable for printing if I put
the images side-by-side you can see I've been able to bring out more detail from
the raw file I probably could have dropped the exposure a little bit more
but the aim of this tutorial is to show you how you can get a better
high-resolution panorama by stitching the images in Lightroom afterwards and
that's about it I find that shooting panoramas this way
gives me a much better quality image I used to use the auto function and just
use the JPEGs but I found time and time again it wouldn't quite produce what I
wanted so I switched it to raw and made sure it saved all these individual files
and then I just stitched them together in lightroom afterwards if you have any
other tips of shooting panoramas from a drone let me know in the comments below
it'd be great to hear your thoughts as always if you like what you see give me
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