Capturing panorama images with DJI Go app

With version 4.2.8 of the DJI Go app and the new firmware version for the DJI Mavic Pro the drone now is capable to capture different panoramic images.

Intorduction

I know that version 4.2.8 of the DJI Go app and the new firmware version 1.04.100 for the DJI Mavic Pro is arround for some while but because of the bad weather i could test out this new feature last weekend. Before this weekend it was either rainy of far too much wind to start the drone, so it wouldn’t take the responsibility. But now i tried the new version 4.2.14 with good weather, even though the drone warned me about too much wind.

Panorama types

The app now can take a horizontal panorama, the same with a 180°, a vertical panorama and of course a sphere panorama. While capturing a vertical or horizontal panorama can be done manually a sphere panorama is a little bit more difficult.

The app

Just select the panorama type you like and push the release button and the app will take the needed number of images and turns the drone for every image.

But the app will alter settings. If you selected DNG format for your images shooting a panorama the app automatically will add JPEG format, so all images will be captured both in JPEG and DNG. This is needed because after the images are taken you can download the images to the app stitch the  panorama on the cell phone. But this only will work with the JPEG format. The resulting panorama will be reduced in size to 4.096×2.048 px which is good compromise to share this image on social media. The resulting JPEG file can be uploaded to the drone.

All images for one panorama are stored in seperate folders, a very nice feature. It makes it very easy to get all images belonging to one panaorama if you plan to use PTGui or other tools to stitch the panorama.

Sphere panoramas

Capturing sphere panoramas suffer from one detail, and that is, the lens of the drone camera can’t be panned enough in heigt, so a piece of the sky area is missing in the stitched image. This problem i already mentioned while testing out the Litchi app.

Stitching the panorama the app must fill up the missing sky area in the app, sometimes this works pretty good and sometimes it will not work out.

But the DJI Go app has another problem compared to the Litchi app. Obviously the DJI app can’t use the gimbal at +30° which means that there are actually 2 rows missing for the panorama.

This makes it a lot harder to stitch the panorama in tools like lets say PTGui. And even a fill up with some images from my cloud archive is hard to do.

Conclusion

Looking at the results i prefer Litchi because first of all there is only one missing row in the sky area and the app contains a lot of other features. On the other hand the DJI Gop app is available for free and you can stitch the panoramas on the smartphone at post the resulting images on social media.

Would you buy the Litchi App or do stick with the DJI Go app? Just leave me your questions and comments.

ciao tuxoche