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Photographs from DJI Phantom 3

Making Aerial Panoramas

How to make amazing Panorama Photographs with a DJI Phantom, DJI Mavic or any Drone in less than 5 minutes!   The Ultimate Aerial Panorama Photograph Guide

Hi Guys! We have been overloaded with questions about how to make Aerial Panorama Photographs with a DJI Phantom or similar drone. A huge part of our commercial business is supplying high quality aerial panorama images for clients and I consider myself a bit of an expert in the area (even if I don't know much else!!)  See link to some of our Aerial Panoramas.
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When we first started looking around for photograph panorama stitching software, it was quite confusing and many (if not most) of the reviews were written by people that sell stitching software rather than use it! We tried a half a dozen different packages from well known brands (Canon and Nikon) through to the lesser known brands and it does your head in! How many times did I see the web phrase "10 best photo stitching software" or something else as frustrating! And nearly every single one of those sites is plugged into a sales system. They certainly don't use it!
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WHAT IS AERIAL PANORAMA STITCHING SOFTWARE?
As a quick overview, the way you make a good quality aerial panorama image, (that's as wide as the ones above) - (Up to 360 degrees), is take a bunch of photos starting with the first image, and then incrementally take more and more overlapping shots until you pretty much have the panorama made up of single images. Then the job is too put them all together.

Photographs from DJI Phantom 3

WHICH PHOTO STITCHING PANORAMA SOFTWARE IS BEST?
As I mentioned, we tried a bunch! (Hugin, Arcsoft, Kolor, Autostitch, Panorama Plus, Panoweaver and several propriety packages that came with our cameras. Each and all had varying outcomes.
Some were pretty good, but one of the common things we found was, if you didn't get your photograph vertical and horizontal alignment exactly right, it could end up in disaster and your image would suffer line ghosting or bright over saturated highlights where the 2 photos had tried to join and match, but ended up hating each other. And that's not a perfect solution when you have a drone dancing around in the sky with wind issues, light issues, limited filter options and worst of all time constraints from batteries ticking away. 

Anyway long story short... we ended up with Panoweaver version 4! Which was a bit primitive at the time, but VERY forgiving with its stitching parameters and the overall quality was excellent! They have now released Panoweaver Version 9 and I gotta say it is pretty kick ass! We torment the software with some pretty ordinary pictures at times, but 9 times out of 10 it sorts it out and delivers amazing results.

But better that that! It is crazy fast and so simple to use! Just import your images and click on stitch!
I know sounds like a bit of a sales plug right!? And I guess it kind of is and if you click on the button below and end up buying it, we do get a small affiliate commission, but  honestly...  I could get the same affiliate commission from anyone or any software company that is a lot easy to recommend!
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HOW GOOD IS THE QUALITY?
For the record, we sell our panoramas at 8 feet wide! (2.4 metres) and never had one back!
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We are considering producing a video about how we put our aerial panoramas together from a DJI Phantom from beginning to end, including the best settings for you DJI Phantom (Or any drone), how to get the picture looking awesome and outputting ready to sell, print or upload. So if you think that's a good idea, please hit the recommend button below and if we get to 200, we will get it underway.

Feel free to ask me any questions you may have
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