System Processing...

I tried processing the 66 images of the house in RealityScan and ended up with a mess. As I mentioned previously, it is a 30-step process and the menu options in the video I am using as a reference do not exactly match what I see on my computer screen. I missed something along the way and ended up with a blurry black-and-white image. So I searched again for a processing program that would be simpler to use and still free. There were good comments on WebODM so I installed that and uploaded the 66 files in 16-bit PNG format.

Which was a mistake. The huge PNG files took forever to upload and ultimately the processing failed. So I uploaded JPGs. It was much faster and it produced an image file with no glaring roof errors. But it is a low-resolution image file, barely larger than my standard 1800x1200 crop. Web searches indicate ways to increase resolution but require Linux-like command knowledge. Do I want to go further down the rabbit hole?

Pix4D seems to be the industry standard for image processing and costs start at $55 a month. I'm not doing that for two or three projects a year using a prosumer drone.

Earlier today I tried Photoshop and had some distortions in the image. I had an idea for tweaking the process and came up with the image below. I checked another box in the options, "Geometric Distortion Correction," which fixed the weirdness in my earlier attempt. This added time to the processing and it took almost an hour to complete. That's the type of thing that you can set running and do something else, unlike RealityScan where you are using that time to go through a long checklist. There is still one roof mismatch above our front porch. I don't know if it is possible to fix that.

Photoshop does not give a Digital Surface Model or any of the other options a true orthomosaic program provides, but it gave me the best image of the programs I used today. Also note that I was able to pull some details out of the shadows in Photoshop, unlike the WebODM image.

This is an 1800x1200 crop of the back of the garage, showing the detail available in the image.

So, bottom line: I can do orthomosaics with mission planning in Litchi Hub, flying the Mini Pro 5, and stitching the images in Photoshop. I'm going to leave it at that and not worry about Digital Surface Models.