I imagine this has to be a consideration for other photographers as well. Do you use the auto-generated panoramic image generated by the drone or do you take the RAW files into Adobe Lightroom for the merge? Learn how Luminar can quickly transform your drone panoramas.
In this edit, I will be using photos from a recent visit to John Muir Memorial County Park in Montello, Wisconsin. 🙂
Don’t Have Luminar Yet? Get the Free Trial NowTable of Contents
- The Original 9-Photo Pano
- Lightroom Classic | Spherical Pano
- Lightroom Classic | Cylindrical Pano
- Lightroom Edit
- DJI Edit
- Final Edit
- Gear & Software
The Original 9-Photo Pano
I select the 9 RAW files created by the DJI M2P, right clicked and selected
Lightroom Classic | Spherical Pano
Lightroom Classic | Cylindrical Pano
I feel the Cylindrical option looks more like the auto-generated DJI pano stitching. In this situation I am actually really liking the extra foreground of trees and the small creek you can see on the left-hand side of the image. I tried perspective but it came up with a very strange result.
Let’s go Cylindrical!
I also opted to to use ‘Fill Edges‘ with ‘Auto Settings‘ and this is what I ended up with.
I click ‘Merge‘ to let Lightroom do it’s photo editing magic.
Lightroom does something really special. It not only combined these 9-photographs into one file, it also creates a massive DNG RAW weighing in at 259MB (vs 11MB the drone created) for the final product. Pretty slick Rick!
Lightroom Edit
DJI Edit
The Lightroom Classic edit looks much more vivid and an increase in detail overall in the photo due to using ‘Auto Settings‘ on the export. The horizon was off by a little bit so I went ahead and fixed that before exporting it for use in Luminar 4.
I applied a Color Style (LUT) called Beijing to the land portion of the image and added a little PRO => Color Enhancer => Brilliance which really livens up the lake water and the left side of the horizon for some greater color contrast.
Last, I squeezed out a little more contrast with actual Color Contract in a new Adjustment Layer, dialed it up to +21 (Amount) and masked it with a gradient mask. Cropped 16:10 for fun.
Final Edit
Click for full-screen view! 🙂
Gear & Software
Gear
Mavic 2 Pro (Amazon | B&H | DJI) (Affiliate)
Software
Luminar 4 by Skylum Software (pst…remember to use coupon code, ‘GRAYDON‘ for $10 OFF!)
Luminar 4 is also available on Amazon: