Editing full 360° panoramas and "protecting borders"

[christianb52134722]

Hi there,

I'm trying to optimize 360° panoramas from my Ricoh Theta S panorama camera in Lightroom CC.

The problem with the developed images is a visible border/edge/line where the left and the right border of the plain jpg meet. This is of cause visible only, when displaying the processed pano in a software or on a website. It looks like this:

Is there a possibility to "protect" the borders in some way while editing? Or is there a way to tell Lightroom that it is handling a 360° panorama?

I could not find one answer in the web. You always get tutorials for merging images to a pano, but never for editing a already merged, full panorama.

Many thanks for your help

Christian

[ssprengel]

There is no special seamless mode for Lightroom that matches the two ends as you edit.  What I have done in the past is to use Photoshop and shift the image over and then heal/clone over the seam.

Photoshop also has a way to project the image into a spherical panorama 3D workspace, but I don't remember how to edit it, directly, to clone out the seam on the projected image, nor how to unwrap it, again.  If you want to play with it, here's how:

[ftarnogol]

How do you revert the spherical projection back to equirectangular?

[Jao vdL]

The spherical panoramas I was referring to are stitched in hugin in equirectangular projection. I was using spherical in the sense of that it is a full sphere around you when projected in a panorama viewer. I share a lot of these on google maps. Here is an example of such a pano: Google Maps.

[Tamarac@indaskys]

Thanks for help

[Jao vdL · Accepted solution]

If you want to edit 360 degree panoramas (I do a lot of those and like to post them on google maps) in Lightroom the cardinal rule is to not touch highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, and Clarity. Those are HDR tools that do not know how to wrap themselves around. You can use the Tone curve. You can also do local edits as long as you don't edit at the left and right border. You can also do graduated filters as long as you make them perfectly horizontal. Here is an example of a spherical pano that I did final edits on in Lightroom: Google Maps. There is a graduated filter in the middle that I edited a bit using brushes. My workflow for these is quite involved but most of the edits happen in Lightroom after stitching.

[christianb52134722]

Cool. Many thanks to both of you!

[marcopolo34]

Jao, looks like you have some experiance with 360 panos. I am trying to stich 36 frames from a phantom drone ( 3 rows x 12 each) but cant get full horizontal sphere. If I go to PS filter/other/offset I can clearly see its not full. I tried many times on various sets but never get full circle. Do I do something wrong? Or there is a trick how to fill missing rows of pixels to overlap left and right side? Thanks

[Jao vdL]

marco,

The issue is that you cannot stitch full 360 panoramas in Lightroom nor in Photoshop. They don't understand going around the 180 degrees borders. You have to use other software to do this. I use hugin, a free and open source piece of software. But this is very hard to install and use. There are many others that are commercial such as PTGui or AutoPano that are much easier to use. They all stitch around the boundaries and can create fully immersive spherical panos. The thread here was really about how to edit the output from such programs in Lightroom.

[boommediaus]

Kolo Autopano Software is better for panos than light room for now

[TaylorJMcBride]

I feel like I may be having the same issue. I'm considering (1) starting a new thread about it (2) continuing to search threads.

I also have a 360 LG camera which has two cameras and does the stitching inside the camera before the file is saved automatically. I import the files into photoshop to apply adjustments, and as long as I retain the metadata to the file, then when I upload it, Facebook and other viewers recognize it as a 360 pano and allow it to be viewed in VR. I've learned from research that there are specific HTML tags you can insert to the medadata (although I don't know what they are!) or sometimes the camera meta data will trigger the viewer. So I just keep the metadata as is (which means I have to edit the file as a JPEG and can not save it as a PSD and then export a JPEG, but I digress.

I found it very hard to locate tutorials on how to take such a file a flat JPEG, and then load it into Photoshops 3D mode to perform edits. Because I have the same issue, I often (especially if I apply very much adjustments) get those sharp lines where the photos are stitching, now if I had to the ability to use the close stamp tool in 3D mode, then I would be able to simply draw over the edge, but when I follow this process outlined in the following youtube video: (which is subtittled and in french) I'm not able to "grab" the image itself as he does in the video, I'm always forced to move my vantage point.

Create a 360° illustration from A to Z on Photoshop - YouTube

Ok so now I feel equally smart and stupid. I have managed to get inside of the 3d Space and look around inside my photograph, but when I try to apply brush or clone stamp to the stitching line, I can not. I have the sphereical panorama selected, but I can not even sample the colors on it.

How do I apply edits to the material?

Taylor J. McBride

Edited by Mod.

[Jao vdL]

Taylor,

the metadata is described on this page: Photo Sphere XMP Metadata  |  Street View  |  Google Developers​.​ This works for Facebook, google maps, and many other places where you can view spherical panorama images. I usually insert this in Photoshop in the metadata file info thing by writing out the metadata to a xmp file, editing that file in a text editor and loading it back into the image. This metadata will then be retained by Lightroom and others.

[TaylorJMcBride]

Thank you that is very helpful

Taylor J McBride

[Personal info removed]

[julezpfeuffer]

Hello, so I have/had the same problem as you: I came to the variant that I put the panorama next to itself and mirrored down and up, then I can also bring in sharpness and gradients (horizontally and vertically unfortunately there are still no curves). Then I export it as JPG and combine the middle image with the 4 images around the outside. Then open the old one with the metadata in Photoshop and put the edited one over it and have a sphere again.

[jefbak]

In regards to color correction tools/filters, has anything changed now that Photoshop CC 2018 is out? I'm trying to apply the Camera Raw Filter, but still having problems with seams in 360 images and it gets really strange if you switch to the new Panoramic layer mode.... The only tutorials I've seen so far are for healing and clone replacement, not retouching support.

[Jao vdL]

No. This is the first thing I looked at and you can't do things like adjustment layers and edit in the 3D environment. Only thing I've seen work is the cloning and brushing directly on the image, adding logos (which is nice as it saves me several steps) and you can dodge and burn directly on the image. So it is not a full solution yet unfortunately. At least I haven't discovered how to do it effectively.

[jefbak]

That is unfortunate. Color correction of 360 images has a higher priority for me than removing tripods....

[bellevue scott]

I do a lot of these, and I do some edits for color and brightness in Photoshop and Lightroom. It's an involved process.

I use a Canon 7D 3/4 frame camera and a 8MM Canon Fisheye. With a tripod head at a 7 degree tilt in landcape mode, I shoot four photos, each with a 90 degree turn. You can also set the camera for bracketing, and do four bracketed shots 90 degrees apart.

At first I don't touch these in Lightroom. I export the images as TIF files and make my equatorial 360 photo in PTGUI. I then take that image and bring it into lightroom, run sharpening, color changes, noise reduction, light changes etc. Edit in photoshop for cloning if necessary, and then upload to places like FB, Flickr, google maps etc.

The new Photoshop 3D mapping makes cloning the nadir easier now, as well as finer touchup.

I use a separate program for

[jefbak]

As an update, it is easier to repair the seam that is created by some of the color correction tools now in Spherical Panorama mode. I open a stitched 360 photo and apply what I want with the Camera Raw filter. After that, I use the 3D/Spherical Panorama/ Covert Current Image to Pano Layer menu option and go looking for seams. Reduce the default FOV from 8 to 1 to see more of the image. I used the Clone Stamp, Healing Brush, and Blur tools to repair the seam. If the seam is in the sky then this is pretty easy. Non-blue sky seams would be a drag.

[TaylorJMcBride]

This is very promising that you can use clone healing and blur tools in sphereical mode to heal the crease manually! Thank you very much guys for the tips

Taylor J. McBride

Creative Director

Cynical Saints Publishing

[Jao vdL]

The way I do this and unfortunately that is still the fastest method is I shoot my image set (I use a nodal ninja rig), do some editing in Lightroom for sharpness and just a bit of light. Export them to 16-bit tiff in ppRGB or aRGB depending on the images. Stitch them in hugin (by far the best at this) and render in tiff. I take these into Lightroom and photoshop and edit them taking absolute care to not touch the seams in a way that would make them unseemly (pardon the pun). I do this by using graduated filters only perfectly horizontal and only brushing in the filters away from the left and right seems. At this point it would be great if I could directly edit the image in Photoshop using the new panoramic stuff but it is just too slow and unwieldy with the 16000x8000 16-bits originals on my not super modern machine. So then I export the image to 8-bit sRGB tiff and run it through a series of panotools scripts (erect2cubic) that generate 6 faces of a cube from the equirectangular original. I edit the nadir image in Photoshop to remove my tripod and add my info and usually brush the zenith image a bit as often there will be a bit of unseemliness there simply from clouds that moved during the taking of the panorama. Then I run cubic2erect and exiftool to get the metadata back into the image and open this in Photoshop in order to finally add the required metadata for a full spherical panorama to work on google maps and in facebook. I export from that to a jpeg file and upload that.

There should be a better way but I haven't found any that give as good results.

[Drones]

Thank You so much.