› I am stitching panoramas. How should I integrate Right Pics Pro in my workflow?
As you know, getting a seamless panoramic view is best achieved by maintaining a constant exposure when shooting the panoramic views. The problem is that the right exposure is different for each view. Right Pics Pro can help solve this dilemma.
First of all, you will need to shoot each one of the panorama's angles of view at different exposures (for instance three exposures at 0, -2, +2 EV). Those exposures should remain the same for all of the angles of view of your panorama. This is easy if your camera has an auto-bracketing function -- set the exposure to manual mode, then select auto-bracketing after having set the appropriate aperture (the bracketing function will change the shutter speed automatically).
There are two possibilities for integrating Right Pics Pro in your workflow -- either processing Right Pics after stitching or prior to stitching.
Our approach is to process Right Pics after stitching. This means producing one panorama for each exposure level and then merging those panoramas in Right Pics.
However, the above approach assumes that the differently exposed panoramas are stitched the same way, i.e. using the same control points for each panorama. This can only work if your panoramic view stitching software makes it possible to replicate the stitching parameters used for one panorama to another panorama, so that it can stitch your differently exposed panoramas exactly the same way. If this is not the case (e.g. with Panoweaver), you will have to use Right Pics prior to stitching, i.e. merging your bracketed shots for each one of the angle of views and then stitch together the resulting images.
Using Right Pics prior to stitching avoids multiple stitches per pano, which is an advantage if your pano is composed of a limited number of views. The drawback however is that this approach may not work well with the dynamic range increase techniques that take the most advantage of local contrast, especially the Tone Mapping tool. Because local contrast is specific to a given view, those techniques produce images with different tone levels, making them more difficult to stitch.
It does not necessarily mean though that you won't be able to stitch images obtained via 32-bit Tone Mapping. We have heard for instance that Realviz Stitcher does a good job at stitching tone mapped images produced by Right Pics Pro (Note: to produce identical panoramas with Stitcher, do not use the template feature but instead replicate the Stitcher project with which you stitched the first panorama). If you have similar experiences with other stitching softwares, please let us know.
To summarize:
If you want to avoid multi-exposure stitching OR your panorama stiching software does not support identical stitching:
Take three bracketed exposures of each part of your panorama and process them in the Batch Processing of Right Pics with "H&S Details - Auto". You will then just have to stitch the images resulting from the batch.
If you want the best quality AND your panorama software supports identical stitching:
Determine the number of exposures you will need for your scene. Stitch a panorama for each one of the exposures, making sure that they are stitched identically. Process your differently exposed panoramas through the Batch Processing, selecting "HDRI/Tone Mapping" (as well as "H&S Details - Auto" and "H&S Details - Adjust", so that you then take what works best for your image).
In any case, we recommend to use Right Pics in batch mode for processing panoramas. The Automatic Batch Processing of Right Pics Pro has been designed with the needs of panographers in mind.
› Could you detail how you stitched the panoramas shown on your samples page?
The panoramas shown on the examples page of this site have been stitched with Panorama Tools (also known as PanoTools). Since PanoTools allows templates, we first stitched a panorama with images shot a the same exposure, and then used the same script to stitch images shot at another exposure. This gave us one panorama at each exposure level. We then processed the differently exposed panoramas in Right Pics Pro.
We used the PTGui interface to run PanoTools. Other programs providing an interface to Panorama Tools are PTAssembler (Windows), Hugin (Linux & Windows) and PTMac (Macintosh).
For the two panoramas processed with the Tone Mapping tool, we also used Enblend, applying it to the differently exposed panoramas. Enblend was particularly useful in this case as it removed the stitching seams that the tone mapping tool would otherwise have enhanced as local details.
One note about using Enblend with Right Pics. The TIFF file produced by Enblend should be flattened before processing it in Right Pics. If you intend to use the tone mapping tool, then it is recommended to ensure that the transparent background becomes black (i.e. pixel values at 0) and not white when flattening the image, or even better to crop the panorama (see question below).
› The tone mapping on my pano resulted in a completely black or completely white image
This sometimes happens when the stitched pano is un-cropped and has black or white bars at top or bottom. This may also happen on individual images taken with a fish-eye lens, with black area outside the circle. In the first case, the solution is to crop the stitched panos, and in the second case, to de-fish the images before processing them in Right Pics.
Please note that this only applies to the Tone Mapping tool. You do not need to de-fish or crop your images when using any of the combination methods of Right Pics.
› When using photos from my 360 one-shot system, I am getting useless output.
When shooting panoramas with a one-shot system, it is often better to use directly the raw (i.e. doughnut-shaped) images as input for Right Pics. After that, you only need to process the resulting image in the unwrapping software that came with your one-shot sytem. If you instead unwrap all differently exposed shots first, you may get images that do not coincide exactly in all points of the scene, and Right Pics will never be able to process them correctly.
› Do you have any advice for shooting virtual tours? I'm a beginner and using a
360 one-shot lens.
- Select a small aperture (e.g. f/8 or higher f-stop number if you camera supports it). This is important to ensure a sufficient depth of field with one-shot systems.
- Select a low ISO setting (e.g. 100).
- Set your camera in Aperture Priority mode, so that only the exposure times (i.e. shutter speed) vary when you are taking the bracketed shots.
- Select Auto Exposure Bracketing (in continuous shooting mode). The camera will automatically vary the shutter speed and shoot the scene at different exposures.
- Set the stop spacing for auto-bracketing at +/-2. If this is not possible with your camera, +/- 1.5 should be still OK. If the maximum stop-spacing on your camera is lower than that, you will have to vary the exposure times manually.
- If there is a bright window, it is a good idea to switch on all available lighting in the room.
- With photos from a one-shot system, we recommend using the Exposure Blending methods, e.g. "H&S Details - Auto" rather than the Tone Mapping tool.
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