360° Spherical Panoramas

[luuuuuuke]

I've been taking some 360° spherical panoramas with my DJI Mavic 2 Pro drone. Due to gimbal limitations, it does not photograph the sky; it can only tilt to 30° above the horizon. It can, however, point straight down. The drone does it's own stitching, and these are okay but quite low resolution. It also saves individual high resolution RAW files.

When I open the individual RAWs into PS and Photomerge into a spherical panorama, the results aren't correct; the bottom (nadir) is pinched (see image).

The idea is to stitch them together, then change the image ratio to 2:1 for a true equirectangular 360° spherical panorama, and the let it do a Content-Aware Fill for the missing portion of sky on the now blank bit of canvas.

This works perfectly if I stitch them together first in another program (I'm using MS ICE) then do the rest in PS. However, it's clunky doing it this way and I'd like to be able to do it all from end to end in PS if possible.

Why is PS not able to stitch it together properly? Other software seems to manage. I've played around with all the various different settings and options, but can't get it to work.

The drone manual says the images are 3x8 +1, but for some reason there are 26 images, not 25 as would be expected.

Please help!

[Shaheen]

If you shrink the vertical dimension of the image it will project correctly in the 360 view...

[Drones]

You just need to edit the limitation from your dji app. Than the gimbal can go much beyond 30 degree. 

[mikea592]

It's 2020 and as far as I can tell PS still can't handle these Pano's from Drones - anyone have any updates?

[Oskar5F9B]

I got similar problem - for the small part of the ground exactly below the drone and for the sky.
Looks like it can be fixed by using 3D options and the generative fill (for something less complex). Unfortunately the new panorama layer looks very bad on my PC - it's much darker and it looks like in lower resolution.
Also on Photoshop 3D | Common questions on discontinued 3D features (adobe.com) we have:

Spherical Panorama editing and support (Note that non-3D panoramic stitching, available under 'Automate > Photomerge', will continue to work, but 3D > Spherical Panorama will not)

- so looks like it will be not possible to fix the panorama using this approach.
Ok - let's say it will work on MS ICE. But it's 2023 and this software is not available (maybe it's possible to find the old installer from untrusted source). Also some people can me the Mac users - I'm not sure it will work.

Should i look for another paid software just fo fix small part of the image?