Panoramic Photos with GoPro

I enjoy shooting landscape photos, particularly in our U.S. national parks. Sometimes when trying to photograph a wide panoramic view, I simply can’t squeeze the entire landscape into a single photo. That’s when I use a technique where I take multiple side-by-side overlapping images and stitch them together using a software application. A useful tutorial is provided by Digital Photography School.

For most casual photographers, the built-in panoramic setting in mobile phones will suffice, but since I’m a photo geek, I prefer to shoot in RAW, apply color corrections to the individual photos, stitch, rotate, crop, and make other finishing touches. I know it requires a lot more steps, but I like the results and frankly am fascinated by the computations that are involved in the stitching process.

On a recent trip to Maui, I wanted to travel lightly and decided to leave my DSLR at home and shoot only with my iPhone and GoPro. Blasphemy, I know! While hiking in the Summit District of Haleakalā National Park, my iPhone battery died so I began shooting photos and videos with my GoPro HERO7 Black. As expected, I found myself in a scenario where I decided it would be best to take multiple images and later stitch them into a panorama.

Not having previously done this with a GoPro, and recognizing that GoPro cameras have super wide angles and significant barrel distortion, I made sure to overlap each individual photo even more than I usually do with my DSLR. The individual photos are here if you want to play with them:

      
      

Panoramic stitching applications use different methods to combine images, so it is not surprising that I got different results from three photo stitching applications. It is possible that their computational methods are detailed elsewhere, but my main focus is on the end result. Here is a summary of my findings.

Adobe Lightroom Classic CC 2017

Fail. The Panorama Merge feature in Adobe Lightroom was unable to stitch together the GoPro photos.

I got the same result with the other 2 projection options. Granted, this is an older version of Lightroom, and it is possible that the latest version would produce different results. In any case, when it successfully stitches photos, I prefer to use Lightroom for panoramas because it is the focal point of my RAW processing workflow.

PhotoStitcher 1.6

Fail. The application said that there were not enough key points.

I got the same results while trying multiple projection options. Once again, this is an older version, and I have not upgraded to version 2 because I frankly don’t use this application very much.

PTGui Pro 10.0

Winner! This is the application that I used to create the panoramic photo that is pictured at the top of this blog. Here is a screenshot of the unedited preview:

Obviously I haven’t been upgrading my software because version 11 is available at the time of this writing, and I assume that the current version would also successfully stitch the GoPro images.

Conclusion: From this comparison and also from prior experiences, I feel that PTGui is the most powerful stitching tool that I’ve tried. If your only available option is a wide angle lens, and if other applications are unable to create panoramas, try PTGui. However, the old adage that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” definitely applies here—try to shoot panoramas with a lens that has less barrel distortion to begin with. I hope you’ve found this to be helpful.