How to Create a High-Resolution 360° Panorama with the DJI Mavic 4 Pro or Mavic 3 Pro (166mm Camera)
Overview: This guide walks you through shooting, editing, and stitching a super high-resolution spherical panorama using a DJI Mavic 3 Pro or Mavic 4 Pro drone. It’s written for photographers who may not have a technical background but want stunning results.
Part 1: Preparing Your Drone
Set a Max Altitude:
In the drone’s safety settings, set the maximum flying height to the altitude you want to shoot the pano. This helps keep the drone stable while you rotate it during shooting. (I press the control stick forward as well as sideways to hold the drone at that height preventing any accidental altitude changes).
Use a Compass Reference:
Point your drone toward the north before you begin. This gives you a clear starting and ending direction for each row of images, making it easier to stay organized.
Manual Exposure Settings:
Switch your camera to manual mode. This keeps the brightness and colors consistent across all images, which makes editing and stitching much easier later.
Part 2: Shooting the Panorama
Start Shooting the First Row:
Begin by taking overlapping photos as you rotate the drone. Make sure each photo overlaps the previous one by about 25%.
Move Down Row by Row:
After completing the first row, tilt the camera (gimbal) slightly downward—about 7%—and shoot the next row. Keep repeating this process until the camera is tilted down to 84%.
Capture the Nadir (Bottom View):
Finish by tilting the camera directly downward (90%) and take one final photo to cover the bottom of the scene.
Part 3: Shooting the Sky
Switch to the 70mm Camera:
Change to the drone’s second camera and choose the spherical panorama shooting mode.
Let the Drone Handle the Sky:
This camera automatically shoots the sky in rows, starting from the horizon and moving upward. You can cancel the process once it starts pointing downward again—or let it finish to have a complete high-res version just in case.
Part 4: Editing and Stitching
Transfer Files:
Move all your photos to a fast hard drive. Processing these large images will require a powerful computer.
Edit in Lightroom:
Adjust colors, brightness, and contrast to make your images look great. Once stitched, there’s limited room for more changes. Save the edits as JPEGs or TIFFs.
Stitch in PTGui Pro:
Load your photos into PTGui Pro. Mask out the ground in the sky shots to avoid overlap.
Save the Panorama:
Export the stitched panorama as a TIFF file. 8-bit quality is usually fine unless you need extreme editing flexibility.
Part 5: Fixing the Sky Hole (Zenith)
Patch the Zenith (Top of the Sky):
The 70mm camera does not shoot the Zenith. Use PTGui’s Convert to Cube Faces tool to extract the top section. Then open that image in any photo editor and fix the hole.
(With most panos you can use the PGui Patch Editor tool, however, with the sheer size of these files the Cube Face conversion is preferable.)
Reconstruct the Panorama:
Load the six cube face images back into PTGui and save your final panorama as a TIFF.
Part 6: Making It Viewable Online
Use Virtual Tour Software:
Use a tool like 3DVista, KRpano, or Pano2VR to turn your panorama into a web-friendly interactive version. This creates an HTML file that you can upload to your website or cloud storage like Amazon S3.
Finally: Here’s a link to what a finished gigapixel pano should look like:
