Greetings to you readers of the site website. In today's article we will tell you about shooting panoramas and how to make a spherical panorama for later viewing in 3D using Flash. You can see an example of such a panorama below.

Theoretical part

Panorama is a wide-format photo made from two or more frames stitched together to capture a larger viewing angle than your lens can allow.

Spherical panorama- this is a panorama made from photographs that, when stitched together, cover all 360 degrees horizontally and 180 degrees vertically, including the surface under and above the photographer. Such a panorama is projected onto the inner surface of the sphere through a special program and when viewing it, the viewer seems to be inside the sphere and can view the panorama by rotating it in any direction. You can see a similar example in the Google Street View service, which allows you to view city streets. Several such spherical panoramas can be combined into one virtual tour, but this will be discussed in a separate article.

A spherical 3D panorama can be made with any camera that has manual settings. It can also be done without the help of a tripod and on a regular smartphone, but alas, there will be many inconsistencies and errors in such panoramas. Simply put, you are unlikely to be able to achieve a normal spherical panorama taken hand-held. By the way, it’s no secret that you can now make a spherical panorama from an Android smartphone with Kit-Kat 4.4 firmware using the Google camera application.

A spherical panorama has one feature - it is not very suitable for viewing on a straight plane. There are several types of projection of a spherical panorama: equidistant projection, cubic and projection in polar coordinates.

Equidistant panorama projection is most often used to create spherical panoramas and mini-planets. But without transformation it is the most difficult to perceive. Are we literally cutting a spherical panorama into planes and laying them out? At the same time, I stretch the top and bottom of the photo to fit the width of the panorama.

The cubic projection is the most convenient projection for retouching and processing, since it does not have the distortions inherent in the previous projection. However, I prefer to process photos before gluing them together.

There are also other projections, one of which is a projection in polar coordinates or, more simply, a “Mini-planet”. In the center of such a projection is the nadir and at the edges is the zenith. You get the impression that you are high above the shooting location. You can read about it in a separate lesson.

Stages of creating a spherical panorama

So, after we have sorted out the types of panoramas and what they eat with what, we can move on to the very stages of creating 3D panoramas.

1. Photography. Photographs are taken of the area from which you want to make a spherical 3D panorama.
2. Panorama stitching. Through a special program PTGui, all frames are stitched into one panorama for further processing and conversion
3. Converting a panorama to Flash format. Using the Pano2VR program, we convert the finished equidistant panorama projection into Flash format for subsequent viewing in 3D mode.

Panorama shooting equipment

Oddly enough, the main equipment is a camera. This can be either a SLR camera or an advanced digital point-and-shoot camera with manual shooting settings. However, using a DSLR camera paired with a wide-angle lens will make your work easier, unlike shooting a panorama with a regular digital camera.

The lens must be used with a short focal length. Wide-angle lenses with a minimum focal length of 10-20mm are suitable for shooting. However, the longer the focal length of the lens, the more frames you will have to take.

For example, with a crop sensor DSLR and a standard 18-55mm kit lens, you will have to take 3 rows of 15 photos each, resulting in a total of 47 frames, while with a fisheye lens you will have enough take only 4-8 pictures, which will take significantly less time to shoot and stitch together photos.

Now let's move on to the most interesting part - the tripod. To shoot spherical panoramas, ideally you will need a tripod with a panoramic head, but if you don’t have one, you can use a regular tripod with a ball head. You ask" What's the difference?". And the fact is that when using a panoramic head, the camera will rotate in such a way that the parallax between frames will be minimal or absent altogether, and the panorama will be stitched together without any problems. With a ball head on a tripod, there will be difficulties in stitching a panorama, especially a shot in a tight space, since the parallax will be very noticeable and interfere with the gluing of frames. But you will read more about the features of parallax and the nodal point of the lens in a separate article. Also, the tripod itself should be strong and stable and preferably have a height of 150 cm or higher.

Preparing and shooting a panorama

Now let's move on to shooting a panorama. Let's consider all the points that need attention special attention. First of all, choose a picturesque place and set up a tripod with a camera where you want to get a 360-degree view.

You need to start shooting a panorama from the bottom up. That is, you first take a shot of the ground or floor (Nadir) directly below the tripod. Then you shoot the bottom row, then the middle row, the top row, and finally we shoot the sky or the ceiling above you (Zenith).

You need to shoot in such a way that each subsequent frame overlaps the previous one by 30% - this is necessary so that when gluing photos into a panorama, the program can put control points on the pictures. If you are shooting a large area without any details, for example a wall or blue sky, then you should overlap the frames by 50%. The most difficult thing is to shoot a panorama with a large area of ​​cloudless sky, so try to shoot in cloudy weather so that the program has something to “grab” in the sky when stitching the panorama together. You should get something similar to what is shown in the picture below.

As I wrote above, the number of rows of photographs will depend on your lens focal length. In my example, I used a lens with a focal length of 17mm paired with a cropped DSLR. So on a full-frame DSLR paired with a 10mm lens, you will get several times fewer frames.

Camera settings

1. First of all, you need to set the minimum focal length on the lens so that the camera's viewing angle is maximum.

2. Next, set the lens focus to manual mode and focus on medium shot your panorama. This is necessary so that the focus does not change with each frame change. In my case, I focused on the Ferris Wheel, since it is a key figure in our spherical panorama.

3. To ensure that everything in the frame is sharp, you need to set the aperture value in the region of f/7 - f/11. It is strictly not recommended to shoot a panorama at the maximum open aperture, since then the depth of field will be reduced to a minimum and half of the panorama will be out of focus.

4. Set the ISO sensitivity value depending on the lighting and the set aperture.

5. You adjust the shutter speed according to the illumination of the frame, but so that there are no overexposures or too dark areas. IN as a last resort shadows can be pulled out in the editor, but overexposure is more difficult to deal with.

6. Shoot in RAW mode or - this will give you the opportunity to adjust the white balance, exposure, draw out shadows, add sharpness and remove noise in RAW files.

Shooting a panorama

And now that you have everything installed and configured, you can start shooting.

Consistently take one frame after another, remembering that the next frame should overlap the previous one by 30%.

If the lighting changes suddenly during shooting, adjust the exposure by changing the shutter speed.

Don't forget that when shooting a panorama, people or cars may get into the frame. Because when assembling a panorama, you may find people with half a body, or a person who will be cloned as a result of getting into the frame several times. Therefore, when shooting, adhere to one simple rule - if the object in the frame is moving in one direction, then you need to shoot in the opposite direction. That is - if man walking past you from left to right, then you need to turn your camera from right to left to prevent this person from getting into your panorama several times.

By the way, the most difficult thing in shooting a spherical panorama is to shoot the floor underneath you (Nadir). To do this, you need to remove the camera from the tripod, holding it at the same point where it was on the tripod, extend it with your straight arm and shoot the frame underneath you. Make sure your legs are not included in the frame. This can be done as shown in the picture below.

Taking pictures of the sky above you (Zenith) is quite simple; you can simply turn the camera up on a tripod and take a picture, or take a picture handheld. There shouldn't be any difficulties with this.

This completes the panorama shooting, now the next step is " " and " ". Do you have any questions? Ask them in the comments!

How to make a panorama - sooner or later every photography enthusiast asks this question. So this question came to me when I decided to take a photograph of some memorable place and then place it on the wall in my apartment. Having a fair amount of experience in amateur photography behind me, I scoured the Internet in search of information on what and how to do to get results and to this result there was no shame in showing the guests his home. In this article, I will share my experience and tell you a couple of secrets about how best to shoot and how to set up the camera to get pictures that can then be combined into a panorama without much effort.

Before you start shooting a panorama, you should make sure that your camera has:

If the functions listed above are available for your camera, then you need to decide on the theme for the frame and find a place where you can realize the frame of your dreams. Once in place, configure your camera to take a panorama according to the instructions below:

1. Install the camera on a tripod and adjust its position relative to the horizon according to the level on the tripod; if you do not have a tripod, proceed to the next step;
2. To select the optimal shutter speed and aperture values, switch to aperture priority mode. Set it to f/8-11, focus on the central subject of the panorama and take a photo. In photo viewing mode, you need to see what ISO and shutter speed values ​​(in addition to the aperture you manually set) the camera has set;
3. Set the shooting mode switch to the manual settings position (letter M in the camera settings) and set the shutter speed and aperture values ​​obtained in the previous paragraph;
4. Set the white balance settings to the mode that best suits your surroundings (sunny, cloudy, etc.). This must be done so that when shooting several frames for panoramas the photographs did not differ from each other in color balance due to different exposures in different frames;
5. Disable autofocus;
6. Turn off image stabilization;
7. Focus on a point corresponding to the distance for your camera, take a couple of test photos and evaluate the result. If necessary, make adjustments to the settings;
8. start shooting.

High quality? They will help you answer this question general recommendations listed below.

1. To shoot a panorama preference should be given to medium and long-focal lenses, if we talk about “fixes” or if you shoot with a lens that has a variable focal length, then with shooting a panorama it is necessary to change the focal length of the lens to a distance corresponding to 50 mm and above. These measures will make it possible to take high-quality photographs that are maximally suitable for creating a panorama based on them, since in most cases they will have minimal geometric distortions and minimal distortion;
2. Avoid the foreground being included in the panorama frame
3. Do not change the focal length and shooting parameters during shooting until the entire series panorama shots will not be filmed.
4. To get a panorama with good resolution, it is better to place the camera in vertical position in relation to the horizon.
5. Overlapping frames (overlapping) should be done from one quarter of the frame and higher (up to 30 - 40%). In the future, this will allow you to more accurately combine the resulting photos with each other.
6. If you are shooting without a tripod, you should avoid long shutter speeds, which will lead to blurred frames. Try to keep the horizon in exactly the same place in your photos.
7. Selecting the focus point according to the distance will allow you to take the photo with maximum .
8. Take photos quickly before the lighting, shadows, weather, etc. change.

That's all, you managed to take the photos correctly for panoramas and you know how to make a panorama, all that remains is to combine the resulting frames for the panorama into a single image. This can be done either manually or automatically, but I will talk about this in the next article.

For your first panorama shoot, print and use my panorama shooting cheat sheet.

Below, for convenience, I have provided a short description of how to make a panorama. So that you don’t forget at the right time how to make a panorama, print out the cheat sheet and use it.

How to make a panorama - cheat sheet

Easily and quickly turn your panoramas into attractive, miniature planets using Photoshop or your favorite graphics editor.

Panoramas are one of my favorite ways to show a scene. They are so interesting and detailed that I advise you to pay attention to them. This little tip adds an extra pinch of creativity, turning standard panoramas into miniature planets that really have a "wow" factor.

The technical name for this technique is "stereographic projection", but don't be intimidated by it compound word, in fact, everything is much simpler. In this example I'll use Photoshop, but you can use any other editor, including GIMP which is free.

Selecting a suitable photo.

Almost any panorama will suit us, but there are moments that will improve the final result.

• Viewing angle- 360 degree panoramas are best because their edges merge together. Narrower angles will also work, but you may need to do some extra work to ensure the colors and textures are consistent across the edges of the panorama and match each other.
• Image width- The aspect ratio (width divided by height) of your photo affects the smoothness of your planet. Wider images tend to produce smoother planet surfaces, while narrower panoramas can produce larger changes in elevation. Both options look great.
• Sky- the panorama sky will be seriously distorted in the final image. Clear skies tend to produce best result, although clouds can give an interesting stretched effect.
• On the first - the bottom of your photo will be squished into a bunch to form the center of the planet, and this may cause some distortion. As with the sky, smooth textures such as grass or sand look better.
• Horizon - must be perfectly aligned so that the edges meet neatly at the base of the steps. If your photo does not meet this parameter, then it can be corrected in a photo editor.

It may seem to you that there are many criteria in our business, but after trying, you will understand that almost any panoramas will do. If you still have doubts, take any panorama that does not fall under the above-mentioned “rules” and try what happens. The result may be interesting and unusual, and normal conditions this won't work. So don't be afraid to experiment.

Transformation of the planet.

Found a suitable image? Fine. Time to turn it into a planet.

1. Making a square image.
First, let's move on to the image sizes. Go to the >image “image” tab. Select the image size. In the window that appears, uncheck “maintain proportions” and set the height in accordance with the width.

This procedure will distort your panorama a little, but don't worry that's how it should be.

2. Apply a gradient to the sky.
This step is optional, but without it, the final image may look warped and pulled at the corners. Select the gradient tool and set the edges to colors that match the prevailing colors of the sky. Set the opacity slider on the left side to 100%, and on the right side to 0%.

Drag the gradient from the top of the photo down as far as possible to create a smooth transition to a solid color.

3. Turn the photo upside down
Go to the Image tab > Rotate Image 180° to flip your image upside down. This ensures that the twisting happens correctly when we turn our panorama into a planet.

4. Applyfilter, polar coordinates
Go to Filters > Distort > Polar Coordinates. In the window that appears, select the “Rectangular to Polar” option and click “ok”.

Voila! Your panorama is now folded into a circle and looks like a small planet photographed from above using a fisheye lens.

5. The finishing touch
Check the top center of your photo, it should be smooth and the joint should not be visible. A stamp or healing brush will help here.
If you prefer your own planet, now is the time to create it. You may still have white corners, but you can fill them with the same color you used in the gradient. Re-crop your image and you're done.

Creating small planets is extremely easy, you will understand it as soon as you try. In the future, you can experiment and get unusual, interesting effects. Therefore, do not think that you need to be rigidly attached to the above rules. If you come up with something unusual and interesting, be sure to share it in the comments.

Examples for inspiration.

Here are some examples to show what's possible when you add a little creativity and imagination to this technique.

Use a photo different terrain to create a jagged asteroid effect.

A post for those who want to try to do it themselves.
Professionals often use Adobe Photoshop with a bunch of corresponding plugins, but the price of this software is affordable only for specialized companies. Therefore, I will tell you how to do the same without any costs, using free software (freeware). For example, like this:

(pictured is Lake Tair, Mari El)

This panorama was made using Imagic 4.0 Free Browser, which is free, but required a lot of failed attempts and subsequent manual work. Several years have passed since then, and I now have to express great gratitude to Microsoft for a magnificent gift that provides amazing quality for stitching panoramas, for example:

Or even this, from just three photos:

But does open source software have enough functionality?
And it depends on what task.

For example, let's look at a special type of panorama - mini-planets (spherical panorama in polar projection), like demyanof :

In addition to the aforementioned Photoshop, PTGui and some other (paid) programs can make such projections.
Upd: True, a free program for Android has already appeared, which will delight smartphone owners!

For ordinary panoramas, the functionality of free software is quite sufficient. But you can’t do everything in one place - you have to use a number of separate programs. Everything is quite simple in fact, and completely free! So, let's go.

1) We take a bunch of consecutive frames with an overlap of 20-30% on each side (if it’s lazy, then it’s better to take vertical ones - to capture more in height; if it’s not lazy, then in several rows); You don’t have to worry about accuracy; you can easily shoot it handheld.
But there are important features of shooting here:

It is more than advisable to shoot with manual settings that are the same for all images, otherwise the panoramic software will not be able to perfectly equalize the brightness. Unfortunately, owners of telephones and simple point-and-shoot cameras are deprived of this opportunity, so below I will tell you in more detail what can be done in the process of photo processing;

The camera must be rotated not around itself, but around the so-called nodal point (which is located inside the lens), otherwise closely spaced objects in adjacent frames will not coincide due to parallax, and the software, even if it can stitch such pictures together, will give many defects during stitching:

It’s surprising that he succeeded at all, because the right photo has uncorrectable overexposure, and the left one is almost completely dark.
But the result can be improved by simply alpha-correcting the left image. Then, when gluing the panorama together, you get a fairly smooth background:

The sky, unfortunately, is very overexposed. But, if we have only two pictures, nothing can be done - because the right picture is irreversibly damaged (color information is lost - it turns out to be pure white).
There are two ways to correct the situation:

For professionals: still try to “save” the original images. Unfortunately, nothing can be done for JPGs in case of overexposure. But when shooting in RAW format, there is a margin of several steps behind those brightness values ​​that, when converting the format to JPG, are displayed as white and black;

For everyone else: use as many frames as possible with as much overlap as possible. Then panoramic software will be able to understand and do it much better:

Both panoramas are made from the same source images, only the top one is from last year's version of Microsoft ICE, and the bottom one is from the latest one. It can be seen that the old one was not able to use all the photographs, but the new one was not only able to, but also much more correctly calculated the brightness correction for each photograph used.

The final result (last year's version, after preliminary manual equalization of the brightness of several photos) turned out like this (I was too lazy to properly equalize the brightness on the left, so the sky still had an incorrect gradient of color and brightness):

Another problem with non-professional cameras (and especially phones) is clearly visible here - uneven brightness in the center of the frame and along the edges.
As a result, the panorama produces noticeable darkening in the area of ​​the frame junctions.
This problem can probably be eliminated by processing the original frames with special filters in the same Photoshop, but I have not seen such a possibility in free software...

Finally, you can move the horizon line, which the program selected automatically:

Here ready-made recipes It’s impossible to give, everyone works to the best of their ability with a graphic editor and artistic taste.

In the left image you can see that after correction (deformation of the selected area or copying from another image), inconsistencies in the density of the sky background remained at the border of the area. It seems to me more convenient (and high-quality) to correct such defects by retouching in FastStone Image Viewer (see below). And in the simplest cases it will be enough to correct all such defects.

Unfortunately, FastStone Image Viewer is not yet able to do arbitrary deformation of individual areas, so the dent on the horizon line (right image) has to be corrected in GIMP.

5) Open the resulting panorama in FastStone Image Viewer and retouch possible artifacts of the panoramic software, and fill in the empty fields in the same way (within reasonable limits, of course). The same can be done in a graphics editor, but this is where I really like the retouching tool!

First, we perform cloning (select “stamp”) to completely fill the empty areas, then switch to the retouching mode and go along the resulting border between the clone and the original. This method works great with clouds! You can repeat retouching as much as you like, from different starting points - and this way you can draw completely different clouds.
This method also works well with grass, soil or asphalt (for example, it is easy to remove a cigarette butt or continue the road in places cut off with glue.
But with waves on the water - not so much, because the waves move and are difficult to match between adjacent frames (panoramic software sometimes even distorts the picture, detecting a similar wave in the wrong place).

6) Download free

Now is the time to stitch the photos together in Photoshop. Today we have little surprise– I recorded the first video lesson about how to make a panorama in photoshop, but I think it wouldn’t hurt to describe the sequence of work in Photoshop step by step. And it’s done one, two, three!

1. We select the files from which we are going to make a panorama and open them all in Photoshop. In principle, you don’t have to open it right away, but in my opinion, it’s more convenient. Go to the menu item File -> Automate->Photomerge. The Photomerge function appeared in Photoshop starting with the CS version, if you have an earlier version, let us know, we will find a solution!

So this window will appear in front of you, where you will need to select files for the panorama, as well as a gluing algorithm.

If you have already opened all the photos in Photoshop, then just click Add Open Files and all the files will immediately move to this window, but if not, then click Browse and select the files from which we are going to make a panorama.

The column on the left presents image merging algorithms.

• “ Auto ” (Auto) Photoshop automatically selects the best mode for the panorama, transforms and merges the original photos, and also corrects colors if necessary.
• “Perspective” creates a perspective effect by using one of the originals (by default, the central image) as a basis and transforming the rest of the photos to give a perspective effect to the overall picture.
• “Cylindrical” gives the panorama a cylindrical distortion, as if the panorama fits into the inside of a cylinder and then unfolds and is placed on the table. This option is good for wide panoramas.
• “ Spherical ” (Spherical) Aligns and transforms images as if they were inscribed on the inner surface of a sphere - this option is suitable for creating 360 panoramas if you took photos for a 360-degree panorama.
• “ Collage ” (Collage) straightens and transforms images, but does not distort them, that is, it only rotates and proportionally enlarges/reduces the source.
• “Reposition” (Move only) simply sets the photos next to each other, as if you were laying them out on a table, without changing or distorting the images.

In most cases the option Auto works great, so leave it, check the box below Blend Images Together, which finds the optimal boundaries between the original photographs of the panorama, substitutes them for each other and corrects the colors, and also marks Correct Geometric Distortions(Correcting geometric distortions). The larger the panorama coverage, the greater these distortions, so I still recommend checking this box. If you stitch together only 2-3 frames in Photoshop, the objects in which are located at approximately the same distance from you, then there may be no need for such an adjustment.

We triumphantly press the button... and wait :) Depending on the power of your computer, the size of the files and their number, the process of gluing them together in Photoshop may take some time, sometimes a long time - after all, Photoshop selects pieces from all your photos, copies them into a separate .psd file as layers, and a mask is attached to each layer, which is quite convenient for subsequent correction of various irregularities and possible inconsistencies.

2. So, when the processing in Photoshop did its job, we got this uneven picture with some white lines. First, let's take a tool Crop and cut out the frame, capturing the filled areas and cropping it the way we need it.

3. Now there are white stripes that will disappear as soon as you combine all the layers, so just click on the triangle in the tab Layers and select the item Flattern Image (Merge Layers)

1	Set the aperture priority mode to f/8-11, focus on the central object of the panorama and take a picture. Remember the values ​​of the received photo.
2	Switch the settings mode to the “M” position and set the shutter speed and aperture values ​​obtained in the previous paragraph.
3	Select a preset white balance (sunny, cloudy, etc.).
4	Turn off autofocus and image stabilization.
5	Manually focus on the center point panoramas or at a point corresponding to the hyperfocal distance of the lens.
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