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EVO II E RTK - Spherical Panorama overexposed

mblacklin

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Hello, yesterday I received an EVO II E RTK, and was using it to capture some spherical panoramas. It captured 26 images in RAW format, but as the images progress, the become more and more over-exposed. Has anyone come across this, and is there a fix?
 

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Image overexposed: too much light.

to change that:

select SHUTTER PRIORITY and increase the SHUTTER value by 1/..
-------------------------------------------------- -------

select APERTURE PRIORITY and increase the APERTURE value by F..

-------------------------------------------------- --------------

Lower ISO, in MANUAL, in ISO MODE
 
Pick the highest value (probably be some section of sky towards the sun) that you don't want over-exposed, and set the camera for that in Manual RAW + JPG. Manual exposure is a better plan for any pano, but in particular 360° ones. In Auto, the stitch lines become obvious and it's more work to blend out if there's variation. Not all lighting conditions are going to work well for panos-- flat, consistent lighting is your friend
 
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Is the camera/sensor in the EVO II RTK the same as in the regular EVO II (e.g. 8K) with fixed aperture? Or, is it a different camera/sensor with variable aperture along with shutter?
 
For this example, your overall exposure was just way too high to begin with, it may or not be fixable in post. but you just need to step it down in similar conditions next time, but still making sure to take into consideration all areas being shot. Your goal is to have all of the images at the same exposure level, creating a roughly balanced lightroom preset and applying it to all of the photos in the sequence. You can more easily fix the general exposure and individual areas of the entire image once it is stitched as well. I have found that most of the time, after my photos are merged, the sky is typically blown out, however usually not enough to be unfixable. If it is however, I just have to start from the beginning again and lower the exposure. Sometimes you can get away with having the top images(above the horizon) being a lower exposure than the below horizon ones. You can also try to do a bracketed exposure shot, but that's not always feasible for all conditions.
 
Hello, yesterday I received an EVO II E RTK...more and more over-exposed. Has anyone come across this, and is there a fix?

Similar results here with Evo II E. Not very impressive.
 
Last edited:
Hello, yesterday I received an EVO II E RTK...more and more over-exposed. Has anyone come across this, and is there a fix?

Similar results here with Evo II E. Not very impressive.

The posters above have already given excellent advice on how to fix this problem, unless there is something that I am missing.

Did you aim at the brightest part of the pano, set the exposure manually using the histogram, then take the pano?

I typically aim at the brightest section, set the exposure, then aim at the darkest section and check the histogram, if the darkest section is crushed then I adjust the exposure upwards a half stop or so unless it is something like a sunset where I want to expose for the sky at all costs.
 
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I posted a 'me too' because I view this as a software/design issue, not a operator/operations issue.

Yes, I aimed at the brightest part, no I did not set manual exposures.

There are two schools of thought on the term Enterprise - aka business or professional.

One being, if you are buying expensive tools, you should know how to use them, and spend the time to dial things in just right.

The second being, if you are a professional, time is valuable, and the extra investment in a supposedly professional tool should make it work, consistently and repeatably with little input from the operator.

I'm very much of the second school of thought. The pano function on the E2E is surprisingly slow, and the extra time of setting exposures is an unexpected surprise. All of this kills precious battery time, not to mention time on site. I respect immensely the attitude that UAVs are flying cameras and should be treated and operated as such, but my view is that it is a flying survey rod (which happens to do a bunch of other fun things while it is in the sky).

At this point, it is going to be faster and more efficient for me to bring my Parrot Anafi along on projects requiring panos, because it 'just works' out of the box.
 
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I posted a 'me too' because I view this as a software/design issue, not a operator/operations issue.

Yes, I aimed at the brightest part, no I did not set manual exposures.

There are two schools of thought on the term Enterprise - aka business or professional.

One being, if you are buying expensive tools, you should know how to use them, and spend the time to dial things in just right.

The second being, if you are a professional, time is valuable, and the extra investment in a supposedly professional tool should make it work, consistently and repeatably with little input from the operator.

I'm very much of the second school of thought. The pano function on the E2E is surprisingly slow, and the extra time of setting exposures is an unexpected surprise. All of this kills precious battery time, not to mention time on site. I respect immensely the attitude that UAVs are flying cameras and should be treated and operated as such, but my view is that it is a flying survey rod (which happens to do a bunch of other fun things while it is in the sky).

At this point, it is going to be faster and more efficient for me to bring my Parrot Anafi along on projects requiring panos, because it 'just works' out of the box.

I definitely think the software and support behind the EVO II RTK is nowhere near enterprise quality. But after having been in the professional photography/videography world for over 10yrs I also think that cameras are one of those tools where you really need to learn at least the basics of the exposure triangle to get acceptable results in almost any situation.

At a minimum you need to know to set it to Aperture priority mode, Daylight WB, RAW capture, ISO100, and F5.6 if you do not want to go fully manual. I do not know anything about the Parrot, maybe its default settings are something useable right out of the box, but if so then its settings are probably something similar to the ones I just listed. All you would have to do is set the EVO II RTK to those settings and at least the photography part would "just work" for 90% of the time.
 
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The second being, if you are a professional, time is valuable, and the extra investment in a supposedly professional tool should make it work, consistently and repeatably with little input from the operator.

Unfortunately, with regard to panorama's specifically, there is not a magic "auto" setting that will deliver "professional" results. As has been discussed already, a panorama requires basically the same manually set exposure for all of the images. Someday, there may be a program that will twirl the uav around sampling all of the lightning conditions and then set the best exposure setting for the batch. Until then, your first option, learning how to do it correctly yourself, is what we have now. This is not unique to the Evo, btw.

Happy learning. When you understand how to do it and start getting good results, think of how satisfying it will be!
 
Unfortunately, with regard to panorama's specifically, there is not a magic "auto" setting that will deliver "professional" results. As has been discussed already, a panorama requires basically the same manually set exposure for all of the images. Someday, there may be a program that will twirl the uav around sampling all of the lightning conditions and then set the best exposure setting for the batch. Until then, your first option, learning how to do it correctly yourself, is what we have now. This is not unique to the Evo, btw.

Happy learning. When you understand how to do it and start getting good results, think of how satisfying it will be!

I agree 100%, Aperture priority mode at F5.6......might yield acceptable results during midday, but to me its risky when blending them together later to ever trust an automatic mode.
 
Latest firmware. I had the same issue, with the aircraft in spherical panorama flight mode -- Manual exposure, manual ISO, manual WB -- and the aircraft totally ignoring my manual inputs, and overexposing several full panorama captures in a row. Smaller f-stops, faster shutter speeds,,, made no difference. Aircraft would do what it wanted, and overexposed the images. As it was for work, I finally shot a manual pano, with all parameters in manual, and capturing all my images needed for the spherical pano, flying manually. "Panorama" Mode was ignoring all manual camera settings. Any solutions?
 
Image overexposed: too much light.

to change that:

select SHUTTER PRIORITY and increase the SHUTTER value by 1/..
-------------------------------------------------- -------

select APERTURE PRIORITY and increase the APERTURE value by F..

-------------------------------------------------- --------------

Lower ISO, in MANUAL, in ISO MODE
No... I had same issue, with all proper manual camera settings, and once in Panorama Flight Mode, the aircraft ignored all the manual settings and over exposed. I shot a panorama flying manually with the same manual camera settings and it was perfect. Something going on with Panorama Mode ignoring camera settings.
 
No... I had same issue, with all proper manual camera settings, and once in Panorama Flight Mode, the aircraft ignored all the manual settings and over exposed. I shot a panorama flying manually with the same manual camera settings and it was perfect. Something going on with Panorama Mode ignoring camera settings.
You are correct. The same thing happens to me with all manual settings. The images that are the most overexposed are the 2 final images and the previous 8. When the camera faces more of the floor it begins to overexpose. I have not found a way around this.
 
Curiously, all the guys (or girls) who are chiming in with the "me too" comments are brand new members. Or is it the same old troll coming in under a new alias? It's like they don't want to be bothered with listening to solutions or learning a new platform. The trolling gets tedious, it seems all of one piece in the same voice
 
I get the same result. Manual settings. It starts off fine but watching on a tablet you can see exposures getting lighter as the 26 images are taken to end up with completely blown out highlights. Loading all the images in Lightroom, they all have the same aperture and shutter speed so it’s definitely a camera firmware issue. When it finishes the 26th image it returns to the proper exposure on screen just as a taunt.
 
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