Spherical image processing

Maddy · Sep 8, 2018

Hi all,
I shot a nice image of a railroad trestle over water in the spherical pano mode with my P4P which download to my ipad mini and looked real cool. Only problem is that I can't do anything with the image and after I close the program on the tablet the image is formatted differently not spherical.
I've attempted to recreate the image via DJI Media Maker with no success as it will only process 5 images, the pano set is 36 images. I've also tried Microsoft ICE, which is not able to process the set to spherical.
After hours of researching with no luck, I'm hoping someone has figured out how to create the spherical image in full resolution and tell me how you did it.
I'm running Windows 10, 64 bit.

Maddy · Sep 9, 2018

I spent some time with PanoramaStudio Pro with no success.

Has anyone figured this out?

Meta4 · Sep 9, 2018

Maddy said:
I spent some time with PanoramaStudio Pro with no success.
Has anyone figured this out?

If you mean something like this: The world's biggest drone photo and video sharing platform | SkyPixel.com
Microsoft ICE (or most other pano stitching software) will do some of what you need.
But there's a bit more to it.
I wrote up the method here: Skypixel 360° Images - WOW

Maddy · Sep 10, 2018

Thanks for that, Meta4. Those are some pretty cool 360's you have there, well done!
I've been able to that in photoshop and figured I'd stitch an image shot in spherical mode with the drone and have a high res image. Well, I found it doesn't work that way. Here's what the image looks like after merging the 34 images together. It isn't a diagonal composition that one could make a 360 of in photoshop, as far as I could figure out anyway.
I took a photo of what I would like have in the end off my tablet as I found no way to save the image to share it with the THETA app used, it's creates a low res and rather useless image anyway.
It seems that if the spherical mode is available on the P4Pv2 that It should be a usable function for printing?

Meta4 · Sep 10, 2018

Maddy said:
Thanks for that, Meta4. Those are some pretty cool 360's you have there, well done!
I've been able to that in photoshop and figured I'd stitch an image shot in spherical mode with the drone and have a high res image. Well, I found it doesn't work that way. Here's what the image looks like after merging the 34 images together.

It's always going to be difficult to stitch images that are mostly of water.
The software works by identifying and matching multiple common points in pairs of images and when the image is water, it just can't do that.

Chrislaf · Sep 10, 2018

I do a lot of Spherical Panos on my Spark and my P3S. My workflow involves shooting the pano in either GO4, Litchi or AutoPilot and then stitching the images using PTGui. As Meta4 said, when shooting over water the software will have difficulty finding control points to match between images so you may have to manually align the images as best you can. What I have found that when shooting a pano on my Spark in GO4 (46 images) the images are usually shot in a specific pattern. I use this pattern to help me place out-of-place or misaligned images approximately where they should be.

Here's an example shot on my Spark this past summer: Porteau Cove

Chris

Maddy · Sep 11, 2018

A non-water image came out the same.

Chrislaf said:
I do a lot of Spherical Panos on my Spark and my P3S. My workflow involves shooting the pano in either GO4, Litchi or AutoPilot and then stitching the images using PTGui. As Meta4 said, when shooting over water the software will have difficulty finding control points to match between images so you may have to manually align the images as best you can. What I have found that when shooting a pano on my Spark in GO4 (46 images) the images are usually shot in a specific pattern. I use this pattern to help me place out-of-place or misaligned images approximately where they should be.

Here's an example shot on my Spark this past summer: Porteau Cove

Chris

Thank you for that, Chris.
I downloaded the PTGui program and put a tiny world image together but after uploading it to photoshop found that the image size was too small for printing, something like 13" x 13" at 96 dpi. Have you figured out how to create an image of the tiny world say 50 MB or around 4800 x 4800?

Chrislaf · Sep 11, 2018

Maddy said:
A non-water image came out the same.

Thank you for that, Chris.
I downloaded the PTGui program and put a tiny world image together but after uploading it to photoshop found that the image size was too small for printing, something like 13" x 13" at 96 dpi. Have you figured out how to create an image of the tiny world say 50 MB or around 4800 x 4800?

Are you using the images from the SD card to create your TinyPlanet or the image file that GO4 creates on the device? GO4 puts all the panorama files in a separate folder on the SD card and numbers the images from 1 to 46 in my case, so it makes it easy to find all the images that go together. I then transfer those images to my laptop where I use PTGui to assemble them into a Spherical Panorama. I choose Tif format 16bit and no compression. I usually get a Spherical pano that is between 1 and 2GB and is greater than 10000 pixels in length and more than 5000 in height, which I then reduce in photoshop to 10000 X 5000 so SkyPixel will accept them. I then change the projection to Little Planet but set the tif file at 8 bits and Packets compression. This usually creates a file between 2 and 3GB which is too large for Lightroom to import so I usually go into Photoshop and reduce the size by 50% which Lightroom can then handle. I still end up with a file that is around 1GB in size. I'm not connected to my drive which has my Lightroom library on it at the moment so can't tell you how large the unedited file out of PTGui is but if my memory serves me correctly it is usually greater than 10000 pixels for TinyPlanets.

I usually don't print my TinyPlanets so can't help there, but maybe Meta4 knows more about the printing aspect.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Maddy · Sep 11, 2018

Chrislaf said:
Are you using the images from the SD card to create your TinyPlanet or the image file that GO4 creates on the device? GO4 puts all the panorama files in a separate folder on the SD card and numbers the images from 1 to 46 in my case, so it makes it easy to find all the images that go together. I then transfer those images to my laptop where I use PTGui to assemble them into a Spherical Panorama. I choose Tif format 16bit and no compression. I usually get a Spherical pano that is between 1 and 2GB and is greater than 10000 pixels in length and more than 5000 in height, which I then reduce in photoshop to 10000 X 5000 so SkyPixel will accept them. I then change the projection to Little Planet but set the tif file at 8 bits and Packets compression. This usually creates a file between 2 and 3GB which is too large for Lightroom to import so I usually go into Photoshop and reduce the size by 50% which Lightroom can then handle. I still end up with a file that is around 1GB in size. I'm not connected to my drive which has my Lightroom library on it at the moment so can't tell you how large the unedited file out of PTGui is but if my memory serves me correctly it is usually greater than 10000 pixels for TinyPlanets.

I usually don't print my TinyPlanets so can't help there, but maybe Meta4 knows more about the printing aspect.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Well that worked. I tried at 100% size the first go which made the file size around 12 GB. Photoshop didn't like that at all! So I ran the batch at 50% which gave me a 3 GB image which is plenty big for any application. Thank for the input!