New PTGui user, having problems with alignment in 360º panos

[Seapy]

Hello,  I have taken several sets of images using a Nikon D3 and a 16mm fisheye lens, initially I am working hand held because I can't carry all my gear and a large heavy tripod with pano head to the top of a mountain on my own!

I realise hand held is not a preferred option but I don't believe that is the root of my problems, I am photographing things which are many miles away.  I am taking six main exposures in portrait (upright) orientation.  I have tried to ensure that the zenith has overlap by watching the rotation of the image (clouds) at the top of the viewfinder, when it swirls well inside the field of view I feel I am rotating under the centre of the axis. The camera is tilted back a bit.  With the camera mounted vertically on a tripod the field of view only leaves a tiny bit of the zenith out of shot (or a small hole in the top of the pano).

On the whole, the main images align together pretty well, certainly good enough at this stage...

My main issues are twofold, firstly the nadir image gets dumped 'somewhere' usually at the left hand end of the image about where the 'equator' line is and the main images are vertically aligned centrally, apparently aligning the centre of the images with the 'equator' guide line.  I need to raise the main images so they are above the top of the alignment screen which will crop them and I need to persuade the nadir image to distribute itself at the bottom of the alignment screen.  Does it matter what order the images are presented to PTGui?

While I made the six main images upright, the nadir image with the camera pointed downwards insists on classifying itself as landscape or horizontal orientation.  I think this may not be helping because the software did warn me that mixing upright and horizontal images wasn't advised...  I have read that rotating the image to correct this may not work because PTGui looks at the original EXIF which may remain unchanged despite rotating the image in Lightroom CC.  How can I control the assigned orientation of the nadir image?  Will check if that can be done in camera settings... 

If I can overcome these software issues and find someone to sherpa my tripod, I intend to create a panorama mount which will rotate the camera around the desired zero parallax point, but I want to at least understand the software side of this first before committing further resources to this branch of photography.  At this stage I'm not looking for perfection, just a working understanding of the basics.  I have watched many of the tutorial videos and read many articles on this, it seems to me that there are a lot of little things that can go wrong but knowing whats at the root of it is key.

Any help or suggestions will be most welcome.

Seapy

[John Houghton]

On Thursday, October 12, 2017 at 3:35:54 PM UTC+1, Seapy wrote:

My main issues are twofold, firstly the nadir image gets dumped 'somewhere' usually at the left hand end of the image about where the 'equator' line is and the main images are vertically aligned centrally, apparently aligning the centre of the images with the 'equator' guide line.  I need to raise the main images so they are above the top of the alignment screen which will crop them and I need to persuade the nadir image to distribute itself at the bottom of the alignment screen.  Does it matter what order the images are presented to PTGui?

No.

While I made the six main images upright, the nadir image with the camera pointed downwards insists on classifying itself as landscape or horizontal orientation.  I think this may not be helping because the software did warn me that mixing upright and horizontal images wasn't advised...  I have read that rotating the image to correct this may not work because PTGui looks at the original EXIF which may remain unchanged despite rotating the image in Lightroom CC.  How can I control the assigned orientation of the nadir image?  Will check if that can be done in camera settings... 

You should be able to turn off the autorotate option in the camera.  Otherwise, if you shoot raw you can rotate the nadir into the same orientation as the horizontal row images in the raw conversion.  Check the orientation tag in the metadata.  The horizontal row images will have an orientation of either -90 or +90, depending on how you hold the camera.  The nadir needs to be in exactly the same orientation.  But if you shoot jpeg, you can rotate the image in Photoshop and output tiff format.  Photoshop discards the orientation tag, so what you see is what PTGui will use.

John

[Seapy]

Thank you John,  I have succeeded in rotating to upright, another nadir from another set of images.  I have to edit to remove myself from the nadir it worked OK apart from my legs!  It's still short at the top, I can't see any way of dragging the main images to the top so I am going to extend the canvas and grow the images taller.  Hope this isn't another no-no!  I only need a bit more to close the gap. 

Either it will work or it won't...  The sky is featureless at the zenith so it should all match up.

Seapy

[Seapy]

I forgot to mention I have turned off the rotate upright control on the camera.

Seapy

[John Houghton]

On Thursday, October 12, 2017 at 6:54:29 PM UTC+1, Seapy wrote:

Thank you John,  I have succeeded in rotating to upright, another nadir from another set of images.  I have to edit to remove myself from the nadir it worked OK apart from my legs!  It's still short at the top, I can't see any way of dragging the main images to the top so I am going to extend the canvas and grow the images taller.  Hope this isn't another no-no!  I only need a bit more to close the gap. 

Either it will work or it won't...  The sky is featureless at the zenith so it should all match up.

You can probably stitch the nadir in best with viewpoint correction, if you have the Pro version of PTGui.  See the tutorial on the web site.  Shooting 360x180 panoramas with a 16mm lens is tricky and requires some care if you're to avoid gaps.  You can take more than one nadir from different positions so that all parts are captured without intrusive legs and shadows.  If you have a hole at the zenith, it's not a good idea to stretch images to close the gap. A better way of doing it is to extract a rectilinear view of the zenith area and fill in the hole in Photoshop using clone tools or content aware fill.  Creating 6 cubic tiles from an equirectangular panorama is a common way of doing this.  After editing any of the tiles (usually the nadir and zenith), a new equirectangular is built from the edited tiles.  That way you have far more control over the final result.

John 

[PTGui Support]

You might want to try PTGui 11 beta, one of the improvements is that it
can handle mixed portrait and landscape images in the same project.

See www.ptgui.com/beta

Kind regards,

New House Internet Services BV
Joost Nieuwenhuijse

-----------------------------------------------
PTGui - Photo Stitching Software

www.ptgui.com
For support see: http://www.ptgui.com/faq/
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[Seapy]

Thank you again John, I am one very happy camper, with the help of your hints I have managed to create a 360X180 Spherical Panorama, OK, not perfect, one condensation trail miss-matches by half it's width and I can see slight miss shading of the blue sky but the meat of the image is pretty well perfect.  I only added 600 pixels to images two and five, which magically spread around the zenith to fill that gap!  I realise it's not the ideal way but it got the job done and helped me gain a better understanding of the process.

The nadir is good, I quickly removed my legs in Ps and my very rough cloning was very nicely masked by the compression which took place when the panorama was processed.

I was becoming somewhat frustrated by the software which is rather daunting on first encounter.  I am a long way from proficient but I can see that I can get where I want to be now.

I take six radial exposures tilted back to the zenith, the remaining hole at the bottom isn't particularly big so one or two more exposures easily takes care of that, a selfi stick might make it easier to keep my legs out!.

I have joined 360Cities, is that the best place to store these panoramas so my friends can view them?  I have an account with Flicker too but I don't think they cater for 360X180 Panos.

Reminding you I am using a 16mm fisheye on a full frame D3, 35mm size. The coverage is pretty phenomenal as is the depth of focus, I have to keep my hands and feet back else they are in the shot.  My reasons for going with 6 exposures is it gives good overlap coverage and it's easy to align the camera with each leg of the tripod, front then back alternately.  Having got this far with your help I will now address the pano head for the tripod.  I have some nice meaty chunks of aluminium, perfect for this.

OK, one more question.  Now I have made my first pano, I have a stack of images just waiting for processing.  How do I save the 10,000 x 5,000 flat rectangular image so that I can fix the zenith in Photoshop CC, preferably in TIFF with layers intact.  Then after making my adjustments, get that image back into PTGui so I can create the stitched panorama?  That seems the best way to make these fine adjustments.

Seapy

[Seapy]

Thank you Joost,  I may do that.  I am running High Sierra on a pretty quick Mac Pro 5.1 with SSD's and plenty RAM.

In a way I am happy to stick with the convention of all images in one orientation, being a newbi, I just was not aware of the complication of mixing them and to be honest I was taken aback when I realised the camera was defaulting to landscape for the nadir.

[John Houghton]

On Thursday, October 12, 2017 at 9:26:52 PM UTC+1, Seapy wrote:

I have joined 360Cities, is that the best place to store these panoramas so my friends can view them?  I have an account with Flicker too but I don't think they cater for 360X180 Panos.

Yes, that's as good a place as any.  You can also store your panoramas in your own web space (if you have any) or show them on facebook.

OK, one more question.  Now I have made my first pano, I have a stack of images just waiting for processing.  How do I save the 10,000 x 5,000 flat rectangular image so that I can fix the zenith in Photoshop CC, preferably in TIFF with layers intact.  Then after making my adjustments, get that image back into PTGui so I can create the stitched panorama?  That seems the best way to make these fine adjustments.

You can just create a 10000x5000 equirectangular image in tiff format preferably.  That can be edited in Photoshop as it stands, of course, but you can generate 6 cube faces for editing using a variety of programs including PTGui via the Tools menu - "Publish to Website".  After editing the nadir and/or zenith tiles, you can input all six back into PTGui to glue them back together.  Lens type rectilinear and fov 90 degrees.  Manually set yaw and pitch values so they are correctly located to just butt together. (Save the project to use as a template in future). Run Create Panorama to generate a psd layered 360x180 equirectangular file and flatten in Photoshop. (This is necessary since PTGui doesn't blend non-overlapping images well to give invisible joins. The new PTGui V11 does manage to do this blending correctly, so for that it's not necessary to create a psd file).

Pano2QVTR is a free Windows program from Garden Gnome Software to make cubic tiles and put them back together.  And I have a tutorial showing how to use PTGui to patch any arbitrary rectilinear view in a panorama: http://www.johnhpanos.com/patch_view.pdf .  There are lots of other ways too!

John

[John Houghton]

On Thursday, October 12, 2017 at 9:37:42 PM UTC+1, Seapy wrote:

Thank you Joost,  I may do that.  I am running High Sierra on a pretty quick Mac Pro 5.1 with SSD's and plenty RAM.

In a way I am happy to stick with the convention of all images in one orientation, being a newbi, I just was not aware of the complication of mixing them and to be honest I was taken aback when I realised the camera was defaulting to landscape for the nadir.

The camera does not just default to landscape.  The problem is that the orientation sensor does not deliver sensible data when the camera is pointing directly up or down.  In either case, gravity is acting at right angles to the image sensor. So there is no up or down direction within the image plane and the orientation is set to an arbitrary value, which can be any one of the four possible orientations.

John

[Seapy]

Once again thanks for your input, I won't be able to do much more for a few days, family commitments getting in the way.  I will experiment with your suggestions and advice.  Once I understand it I'm sure it will all just fall into place.

This is the URL of the pano I just made with your help.

https://www.360cities.net/image/stickle-pike-and-stickle-tarn-english-lake-district

I took several from the top of Stickle Pike which features in this pano. Also some from beside the little tarn.  Will process them asap and publish them.  Hopefully I can get PTGui licence soon so I can get rid of the watermarks.  I didn't want to spend on the licence until I was confident I could master the software.  I'm a long way from proficient but at least I have one pano up there!  ;-)

I am amazed how it works on my iPhone, WOW!

Seapy

[RoyReed]

Just to add that Flickr will display 360° equirectangular images, but it's relatively crude compared to other sites (the zenith and nadir show 'pinching' of the image). Here's an example: https://www.flickr.com/photos/royreed/36998041503/

Tony Redhead has a web page showing the various pano hosting services:
https://tonyredhead.com/360panoramas/what-does-it-look-like

[Seapy]

Thank you Roy, much appreciated.  This is very new to me, I have of course seen the excellent 360-180º panos on Google Earth, The Salisbury Cathedral one sticks in my mind but there are of course many other wonderful examples.

The Tony Redhead link is very interesting, thanks for that.

I am otherwise engaged at the moment but I am planning to make myself a panoramic head when I get a chance.  I can now see it will have big advantages when stitching.  Far more control for a start.

I will post an account online with a link from here if anybody wants to take a look.

I have lots of ideas and plans for 360-180º panos in my mind.  Just need to convert them to reality!