Best workflow to ensure maximum preservation of details in shadows and highlights in a 360 file for final editing in Lightroom?

[Victor Lin]

I've got RAWs shot automatically with a DJI drone that I want to stitch into a 360 file in a way that preserves as much shadow and highlight detail as possible so that I recover as much data as possible in Lightroom or Affinity photo later. PTGui is simply used for stitching and blending, but it needs to provide an output file with maximum shadow and highlight data for final grading in Lightroom / Affinity Photo.

Right now this is what I do:

1. Allow the drone to automatically capture all the images it needs for a 360. This is NOT an HDR shooting workflow - only one exposure is taken for each photo section.

2. Convert all the drone RAWs into 16-bit TIFs in Lightroom using the white balance embedded in the RAW. This is to get rid of vignetting in the RAWs.

3. I load all the TIFs into PTGui and this is where I need help. The individual images do not have the same exposure settings since the drone uses automatic exposure for each shot. 

To preserve maximum shadow and highlight detail should I completely ignore the Exposure / HDR / Tonemapping section in PTGui and just output as a 16-bit TIF?

This section seems to modify shadow/highlights, but I do this in other software and I don't want PTGui to do this (Lightroom Classic 11.4, as far as I can tell, is now 360 Edge-Aware and I can't find seams in Lightroom's output when they're viewed in PT Viewer).

[Star QualityVideo]

I've tried this with no success compared to bracketed photos shot Full Frame with a REAL lense and even it is missing a lot of light data.

[Philip Chong]

Hello. I am in the same boat as you. I do lots of drone 360. i only use PTGui for stitching ONLY, nothing else, no tone mapping, no fill in the top nadir, etc etc.  It is too bad it lost alot of information when you convert to TIFF. One  clue is that the Temperature is now -100 to 100, not 2500 to 5000K like when it is in DNG.

We talk about this in another post about how the RAW data got lost once its converted to TIFF.

BTW, I would turn off Automatic exposure of each of the photo in the Drone when I do 360 Pano. I also set the Temperature to Manual, no AUTO.

[Kuba Piwowarczyk]

Here is my workflow to preserve as much detail from RAWs when I'm not shooting HDR:

All of my adjustments are made in Adobe Camera Raw, and then I process using the "Image Processor" plug-in in Adobe Bridge.

1. I'll do a basic white balance adjustment to roughly where I want it and then apply the same white balance settings to all photos during the conversion. I usually don't bother to shoot with a locked white balance as there is no loss in setting a consistent white balance after the fact if shooting in RAW.

2. I do lens adjustments like distortion and chromatic aberration removal.

3. If I have a lot of shadow and highlight detail, I'll push shadows, pull highlights, and generally reduce the contrast of the image. This will get most of the pixel values out of the extremes and hopefully retain more of the data. Theoretically, a 16-bit lossless TIFF should keep a lot if not all of this detail, however, a dedicated RAW processor might do a better job of getting as much detail as possible out of everything. 

4. I do shoot at locked exposures when I can, but PTGui should be able to handle basic exposure adjustments after the fact. As long as your EXIF data is maintained in your TIFFSs PTGui should know exactly how much to "push and pull" each image. If not, you can always manually adjust exposure (or make a script) to ensure that the exposure for each image is consistent during your RAW processing step. 

-- For the automated PTGui route, open the advanced settings, go to Exposure/HDR, and you should be able to turn on the "Optimize Brightness" setting.

5. As a final step, when shooting my non-hdr panoramas, I use a feature in my camera called "highlight-weighted metering" (I have a Nikon D780, but other cameras also sometimes have this). This is a metering mode that sets exposure in such a way that none of the highlights are blown. That way I can extract all of the detail I need out of the shadows and have nothing lost. Though, this only really works well if your camera is iso-invariant.

Hope this is helpful to someone.

[George Palov]

Apart from what Kuba said, choosing Adobe Neutral or you camera specific LINEAR profile (you have to search for it on internet) can help get the most dynamic range from non HDR image.