This is Ben from Life in 360 and in this video I'm going to show you how to shoot 360
panoramas using your DJI Mavic and the Litchi app!
So in the early days of shooting panoramas, photographers would stitch together a bunch of high-res DSLR photos
into one panoramic shot which allows you to then scroll around it later. You
get heat and heaps of resolution and now you can do that using a drone and right now
I've got the DJI Mavic, I just got in the mail from gearbest.com (I'm gonna
give you guys a special link where you can get these really cheap at the end of the
video) and I'm going to put this up in the air and do the same thing. I'm going
to take 34 photos which then I'm going to stitch together into an ultra high
res panorama and it's actually very easy. All you need is Mavic and the
Litchi app which I've downloaded in the app store, it's for both Apple and Android.
This app is super cool because it actually takes control of the Mavic's
little camera and it's going to take 34 shots for us in every direction, in a way
that they will be stitchable later on. So it'll go like this, beep beep beep then
I'll turn beep beep beep so we get the full 360. Unfortunately, it doesn't get above the
drone obviously because the propellers are there. You will want to get up
high enough that all the details are below you and the sky above is kind
of less important. I'm shooting for tiny planets purposes; I want to turn this
into a really high res tiny planet but essentially if you want the sky you're
probably going to have to patch it in later in Photoshop or another program.
This essentially captures the majority of the landscape just not above
the drone. But still this is pretty cool given you don't actually need a 360
camera to take a 360 photo. So, let's give it a go, take off!
This is pretty cool Wow look at it -- look at it go! Flying it's like a UFO! Oh my God, I'm doing it!
I didn't crash it.. yet!
Yay! Didn't crash it, didn't crash it. Oh! Oh! They didn't crash it! Yeah! Yeah! Oh ha!
It gives you the full controls of operating the drone within the Litchi app so what
we're going to do is bring the drone into the sky and then we're going to
change into pano mode. It's probably not the best day today because as you can
see the drone's shaking a bit so I'm going to try and find a less windy spot
because it's crucial that you have your drone in a spot that it's not going to
shake because when it's taking the panos, it's going to
need to be able to stitch them together cleanly. So the drone essentially can't
move within about a meter or so of where it's going to be hovering. Let's go! So we
have our drone hovering over the spot we want to shoot and luckily the wind has
calmed down. Now, I'm going to go into pano mode which is at the top left.
You change from FPV to pano and we can see our panorama settings, we want four
rows, top row angle 15 degrees, photos per row 8, and we just hit 'start 34 photos'
and now it's going to automatically take photos for us in every direction. As you
can see it's moving the field of view so it captures every piece of the jigsaw
puzzle of this landscape. It's doing it one at a time until we get to 34.
This is absolutely incredible because the drone is fighting the wind while
it's taking these panos yet on this screen here it's staying dead still. It
doesn't look like there's anything going on yet I can see the drone it's on
almost a 45-degree angle so this is actually incredible. This piece of
technology and hopefully it's not too much of an issue with the stitching. We
will find out later ideally you do want to go out on a still day but this is the
conditions that Mother Nature has given us so we'll just have to deal with it
for now and as you can see down here we're 19 photos in of 34 and it's done
roughly a 180 degree part of our full 360. Ok our pano has finished and I'm
going to send it back to home now.
I think that turned out pretty well now let's head over to the edit suite
and stitch these bad boys together. Now have a look at these photos they are
looking excellent. We have all the pieces of the puzzle of our landscape
that we just shot and each individual photo is four thousand pixels by three
thousand pixels, look at that and there are thirty four of these things so can
you see the value in trying something like this to get that extra resolution because
roughly one photo is the same size as what a 360 camera could deliver
so I can't wait to see the crazy high resolution we'll get. In terms of
stitching these things there are heaps of options for stitching programs from
my research so far, consistently I'm seeing that PTGui is the best option for
stitching. It is a paid app, they do have a free version as well and there are also
other apps you can use. There's a free one called Hugin. I've found that to be
ok but it had a lot of issues with it. There are many others for both
Windows and Mac so you will want to check them out. Now I want to throw it
over to Joel from Lil' Planets, you might have seen him on Instagram he's
extremely experienced with stitching drone panoramas and he's going to show
you exactly how to stitch your 360 panorama shot from your Mavic using the
PTGui app. This guy has done thousands of them, he's made every
mistake in the book so his expertise is a thousand times better than mine.
Therefore without further ado, over to you Joel. Hey thanks Ben. Today I'm
going to show you guys how to take the photos from Ben's Mavic Pro and turn that
into a full 360 image using a variety of software including PTGui,
Photoshop and Lightroom. The first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and
select my images and pull those into Lightroom and once they have loaded into
Lightroom I'm going to go ahead and import them. Once the images have
finished importing I'm going to select one image that has a good amount of sky
and a good amount of land then I'm going to adjust the settings on that image to
my liking.
Alright, now that I have the settings I like I'm going to select all the images
and copy all the settings to the rest of the images. You'll see here now I have a
consistent set of images and now I'm going to export them all into JPEGs into
a new folder. I'm gonna label 'photos for stitching' all right go ahead and export
once those have finished exporting I'm going to pull the new set of images into
PTGui.
I will then click the align settings or align images button and I'll go ahead and
let PTGui stitch the images together based off of the lens data from the
camera. Now, you'll see a preview of the full 360 panorama and it
actually looks pretty good so far. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to turn
it into little planet mode and you'll see a tiny planet version of the drone
images. Now, I'm going to go ahead and export this JPEG so we can pull it into
Photoshop to inspect the level or the image at a detail level that way we can
see if there's any stitching errors or anything wrong with the image.
I'm going to zoom in and see if there's any stitching errors it looks like there is,
something here by Ben's shadow so go ahead and mark that for later.
It looks like we got one here as well and we got one right here
at the top. Looks like we got one here on the left as well so I'm actually
now going to go back to PTGui and I'm going to use the masking tool that they
have to mask out some of the areas that didn't stitch together properly. We
got this one by Ben's shadow and we got this other one that was on the left side
of the image sorry the right side of the image, we'll go ahead
and export a new JPEG with these adjustments.
Once that is finished saving we're gonna go ahead and pull this new image back
into Photoshop and we're gonna inspect it at a detailed level. It looks like
the shadow on where Ben was is fixed, it looks like this area still needs some
work. The issue at the top here was fixed. Let's check the right side of the image
and let's see it looks like there's still a little error here. I'm gonna
go ahead and select this area in Photoshop and I'm going to use the free
transform tool to have the horizon lines meet together then I'm gonna use the
clone tool to smooth out the scene. I'm actually going to go ahead and
select this area to keep my clone work area nice and clean. I'm
gonna fix the water right here i'm gonna blend that together with the
clone tool and then I'll go into the tree area and kind of mend those
together so you can't see where the air was. Lastly, I'll go ahead and
fix where the clouds are. Alright. That looks pretty good so we'll move on to
the other stitching area that didn't get fixed. We'll do a similar thing we'll
just select it out then we'll use the free transform to have the horizon lines
meet. Then, use the clone tool again to smooth out the scene.
Fix the land area there and then we'll go down to the water area -- smooth that
out and then the little marsh area.
That's looking pretty good and I'm actually gonna get rid of this tree
so you can't see where I've cloned the land area here, that looks pretty
seamless. We'll go ahead and zoom out view our whole image here
and you'll notice we have this kind of black area around, we'll want to crop
that out so we'll go ahead and do that right now. All right that looks pretty
good! Go ahead and save that and it might take a second
since it is a very large image. Last thing I'm going to do is
just add a curves adjustment where we can adjust the contrast. Get that
exposure valve in exactly the way we want it and then also I'm going to use
the Selective color tool to darken the sky and the water a little bit to make
the image pop and then lastly I'll just add a little bit of saturation because
it's always nice to have those colors be a little bit more bold. There you
have it, that's our finished tiny planet image from Ben's Mavic drone shots
and I'm gonna go ahead and send this image back over to Ben and I'll let him
finish up the video. Thanks and here we have the final image and look at that
resolution oh my god! I have never ever taken a 360 or a tiny planet with this
much resolution ever and guess what -- it wasn't even taken with the 360 camera.
Can you believe that? Thank you so much Joel for your expertise I am addicted to
this style already I can't wait to just shoot the crap out of every landscape I
visit from now on knowing I can get that much resolution. Honestly, when you use a
360 camera and you stretch it around into a tiny planet you lose a lot of
resolution it looks great on Instagram but for anything more it's not enough
resolution so this is an excellent solution for people who are looking to
print out their work or want to display it on high-res screens. Anything beyond
Instagram and you want to consider something like this. Ok here comes
something exciting because gearbest.com like me a lot they agreed to give my
followers only a special discount on brand new DJI Mavics
like seriously cheap. I would say this is the cheapest on the Internet so take
advantage of it. If you don't have a Mavic yet they're going to offer you
guys the Mavic fly more kit for only $1131 and I haven't seen it that
cheap on the entire internet so take advantage
of it. Follow the link in the description and enter the coupon code and that is
yours. If you want just the Mavic Pro drone you can get that as well. They're
going to discount it for you guys down to $915 that is
excellent. However, I would recommend the fly more kit it just means you get more
batteries, more accessories and you'll have a smoother time while you're
actually shooting. I'll put a coupon code for both of these deals down in the
description so definitely click the link and check them out if you're looking to
add a Mavic to your 360 shooting kit. By the way here's a sneak peek at my
next drone video. If you want to see it, you should definitely hit that subscribe
button! Who knows what's gonna happen.. will I
crash the drone into that Lagoon behind me? There's a very very strong chance that
could happen. So, stay tuned for that and I'll talk to you guys soon.