Little planet
Someone on FB asked me how I made this, so here is how:
Process to make this:
(1) fly to position and lock exposure, focus & white balance, then tell the drone to capture a 360 panorama (mines a DJI Mavic Pro but all DJI drones can shoot pans) – it then auto shoots 34 overlapping photos, rotating & angling camera… (also need low wind, as dont want drone to drift etc while shooting or you can end up with gaps in the panorama)
(2) load the 34 photos into an app, in my case AutoPanoGiga which identifies them as a panorama and stitches the photos into one image, cleverly removing ghosting/overlap between photos etc…
(3) take the single stitched/rendered panorama into Photoshop, then extend the canvas so if eg the width is 20,000px then the height is half that 10,000pix as the 2×1 aspect ratio is a requirement for FB to see it as a 360 image…
(4) extend/replace some of the sky. The drone cant shoot above its propellors… i have a library of skies & find one that matches colour, clouds & position of sun. Scale and position it to match & then I use a gradient mask to merge the sky extention with the stitched image.
(5) Export final image as a JPG 8000x4000px
(6) use OSX Terminal (with exiftool installed) to rewrite metadata on final image using this command:
exiftool -ProjectionType=”equirectangular” myphoto.jpg
(7) upload final image to FB, which displays it as a 360 VR (can then also edit the initial FB view & zoom)
(8) little planet version is created in Photoshop using the Flexify plugin on the final image
Here is a small version of the final stitched image, as per FB360VR image & before using Flexfy plugin to create little planet:
