Thank you very much for your informative post about 360-photos. After reading your original post I've tried 360-photos a couple of times with my
P4P and I'm sold on it! I love them. If you export them to FB in for example 15.000x7.500 you can zoom in quite a lot, very impressive.
Yes, you are correct, the low-resolution 360-jpg doesn't have the "ProjectionType=equirectangular", you have to insert that.
I've bought PTGui Pro, what a great program. But I've also noticed that you have to use HDR since you often are shooting into the sun.
A question: When you do 360/HDR-photos, do you load all 3x34 photos from LR to PTGui and just let it work, or do you make 34 HDR-photos in LR first and upload them to PTGui? Can you remove some photos and just upload, say 20/34/17 (from the different exposures) to PTGui? Of course I can test for myself, but since you have so much knowledge about this I would appreciate if you could help me.
Oh, thanks for confirming that the metadata is missing. I hadn’t checked that yet so good to know for sure.
You’re welcome. I think have tested I think every permutation you mentioned and more. Glad my obsessing is useful to others, too. [emoji854]
I love PTGui. It’s what I do all of my hdr pano work with, and have used it to create lots of hdr 360 panos. Re: your question - I use PTGui’s to recognize HDR brackets so pull all 34 shots per exposure into PTGui. The problem is if you don’t drag a full matching set per exposure PTGui gets mad and doesn’t recognize it as an HDR. usually. So for example with a 34 shot x 3 exposure set, I would:
① Ingest them all into Lightroom¹,
② Do any basic/global edits to all the shots. I have a preset I apply, basic lens profile, DNG color profile, usually will do +40 shadows and -40 highlights and I’ve found that the vast majority of my drone images benefit from +20 to +40 dehaze.
③ export all images from all the exposure into a temp folder (as tiff if I’m going for all our quality, but typically HQ jpg is going to be nigh indistinguishable).
④ Drag them all into PTGui and run the initial auto align. I’m not at my machine right now but you want the setting that sets it up as hdr layers. If it doesn’t ask you may need to toggle it via the advanced settings, forget which tab it is in.
⑤ So one of the problems and tricks with the photosphere HDRs is what you hinted at in your question - the darks for the sun end up nearly black or totally black on the ground and so there are often then images that don’t auto align. Instead of removing them from the project you can just mask them out completely, though, if not needed. E.G.if the straight down black exposures are just in the middle of your sky just mask them out.
⑥ The other challenge with the photospheres becomes seaming. If you export to say a layered EXR then tone map in another app you’re going to have a wicked seam bc the two edges won’t match anymore. For that reason I typically do the basic tone map in PTGui. Uncheck the “auto” for highlights and shadows, though, that overcooks. Uncheck that then use the arrow keys up/down after clicking on the slider & you can fine tune those settings (a good value is almost always <2) then tweak compression and contrast the same way. You can tab between them, too, for faster tweaking.
⑦ if you haven’t noticed, you can also render out multiple file types. In this case I’d save out a layered EXR as a master for archive and then a jpg if you’re done or a PSB if you want to tweak more in photoshop. You can do a TIFF too but the PSB is both smaller (by a LOT) and faster to work with.
⑧ I have had success with doing some additional post work in photoshop including using filters, the trick is to throw a mask on the edited layers with a grad opacity that goes back to 0% before the left and right edges. This means you do want to be sure the least important part of your pic is at those seams and it does limit how nuts you can go bc the editing fades away at the edges.
NOTE - In theory the new photosphere pano editing mode should actually address this but I haven’t given it a really good work through yet. I’d be curious if your results if you do.
ALL that said - I have had extremely poor results trying to stitch the DJI preset 34 shot photospheres via PTGui. :/ in particular the maximum upwards images are just a couple degrees too far up so there is usually not quite enough horizon to match on. This isn’t as bad if you’re below 30’ or so or surrounded by higher horizon, but otherwise it very often fails in those and even manually setting the points is a royal PITA because I can barely see the horizon if at all.
I created lots of great HDR photospheres with PTGui
though, but the best ones have been shot manually which is typically more like 50 shots I think. I’ve gotten a couple good results from the DJI preset, mostly at low altitude like I said, or with a bit more labor getting stuff aligned.
Def frustrating bc of how much faster it is vs doing by hand. :/
¹ I recommend retaining the original folder structure btw. There’s a lot of great stuff you can do with PTGui for batch processing but it needs some way to differentiate the panos. The processing happens outside of Lightroom so collections won’t suffice.
PS. I typed this out on my phone so forgive the probably plenty of typos
Pps can’t remember if I liked this from the original post, but I fleshed out my first posts on my blog here
DJI Phantom 4 Pro Panorama Mode review - JeremyPollack.net