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Stitching Photos - Merging Multiple Photos Question

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I noticed that a lot of the truly amazing photos on the forums where stitched. I have not do this yet but will start.

I realize there is some stitching software for 360 panoramos. I am talking more when some stiches 6 photos together to get a wider field. I think you can do this easy in photoshop.

So my question is the quad stationary and take photos and just turn? Or is one flying on a straight line maybe 50 feet and shoot again?

Wasn't sure if there would be bend or paralax if jut turned it?

Does my question make sense?

Can anyone shed some light?
 
It is very easy to stitch panoramas in photoshop or lightroom. I pretty much use lightroom exclusively for this so I will break it down for ya.

The beauty of the Inspire is the flat lens profile, so basically all you need to do is determine how much area you want to cover for the final composition, and then rotate the Inspire. Flying it horizontally over to the next 'frame' will do nothing as you want the image to appear seamlessly shot from one perspective, thus the rotation.

You can either rotate with the inspire itself or set the gimbal to pan instead of tilt. Probably easier to just rotate the bird. Pick your image to the far left, snap, then make your way over with at least 25% overlap in the shot. Use landmarks to help with this. The more overlap you have, the less spherical distortion there will be present in the image. I find about 1/4 of the frame works well.

Do a two layer panorama if you like, i.e. aim higher than you normally would (horizon dividing the bottom 1/4 of the frame), shoot the panoramas left to right, then do the same pointed downwards. Now you have LOTS of resolution to work with.

Once the images are captured, bring them into lightroom, select the ones you want to merge, right click the grouping and hit 'Photo Merge > Panorama'. It will provide a preview. Select either cylindrical or spherical (cylindrical looks more vertically stretched but flatter) and hit ok. It will take a while to merge but you should have a perfect image come out. Then play with your colour/saturation etc. and crop as needed. You will get an image like these(hopefully):

cropped.jpg
 

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  • YEG w- X5.jpg
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Sure in theory it would be ideal to keep the angle constant and shift the point of view but as it's impractical unless you have a close subject (you'd have to move by several kms for a distant landscape) everybody instead turns the camera at a fixed point of view and stitching software is designed to handle that correctly.
 
Great shots!!!!!!!

So just so I have my mind wrapped around it. In the photos above, several photos were used. On the hortizional access. (kind of like using the pano feature on the iPhone.) I imaging if you pan down a bit and replicate the same shots you could get a bigger photo wide and in height. For example 3 shots across. Lower camera view (aim down) and take similar 3 across.(6 total shots)

Hypothetically you could get the quadcopter further back and get this shot (in 1 photo)and crop to appear panoramic.

The benefit of stitching is (let me see if I have this correct)

1) you are closer to the subject (do not have to fly farther away)
2) because you are bringing in multiple shots the photo is bigger allowing for a clearer photo
3) and if printed in a bigger format you have enough pixels/size to print it without pixelating. (lets say you were going to blow it up poster size)

Anyone use the ios app - drone pan? Looks awesome.
 
Great shots!!!!!!!

So just so I have my mind wrapped around it. In the photos above, several photos were used. On the hortizional access. (kind of like using the pano feature on the iPhone.) I imaging if you pan down a bit and replicate the same shots you could get a bigger photo wide and in height. For example 3 shots across. Lower camera view (aim down) and take similar 3 across.(6 total shots)

Hypothetically you could get the quadcopter further back and get this shot (in 1 photo)and crop to appear panoramic.

The benefit of stitching is (let me see if I have this correct)

1) you are closer to the subject (do not have to fly farther away)
2) because you are bringing in multiple shots the photo is bigger allowing for a clearer photo
3) and if printed in a bigger format you have enough pixels/size to print it without pixelating. (lets say you were going to blow it up poster size)

Anyone use the ios app - drone pan? Looks awesome.

You got it. Yes the first one was two shots (smaller crop from a 6 shot pano), the winter one was three shots (X5 camera) and the summer cityscape was 2 vertical by 5 horizontal I believe.

You are correct on the benefits, anyone can crop a single shot super wide, but at 12 MP it's really not going to look all that great unless it is fine having it super small.
I got a print done of the 2-layer shot that was 49" wide, and it looks pretty nice even from up close. Good luck cropping a single shot and printing it that big... It'll never happen.
 

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