The Hollywood Panorama: Shoot HDR 360° Panoramas like a pro!

1. Introduction: If you've ever wanted to learn how to shoot high dynamic range 360 panoramas. This is the masterclass. I'm Este Heyns, and I'm a VFX texture photographer and data wrangler. I work for studios like Marvel, Legendary, DC, Netflix. As part of my job, I shoot these HDR panoramas on a daily basis. This course is a look behind the smoke and mirrors of Hollywood at the exact workflow used in VFX blockbusters like Thor, Love and Thunder, Godzilla versus Kong, Aquaman, Black Widow, and so many more. You'll learn the exact step-by-step process on creating the highest-quality HDR. 360° panoramas, so that your work is a cut above the rest. This course covers everything from core photography principles, preparation, shooting, processing, and application. And that includes what camera settings to use, how to find your nodal point, how to find your shooting angle formula, in-depth hands-on walkthroughs, on shooting your panoramas, processing, and application. That is merging your HDR, stitching your panoramas, tone mapping, removing the tripod. Then application. We cover 3D image-based lighting, virtual reality, virtual tours, and so much more. This is for any photographer looking to upgrade their skill set or potentially open opportunities into other industries. And best of all, you'll be able to do all of this with whatever gear you already have. You can shoot it on any camera, any lens, any tripod. You just need a panoramic head. Plus, you'll learn how to do all of this with free software. So there really is nothing standing in your way of creating epic 360 panoramas. To tell you the truth. I wish I had some sort of guide or source of information when I was starting out, never mind a step-by-step workflow. And that's why I created this course. I wanted to share this knowledge in a way that's easy to digest and apply. So by the end of this course, you'll be able to shoot the highest quality HDR 360 panoramas. And you'll be able to do it efficiently and with a guaranteed stitch every single time. So upload your completed panoramas to our project gallery. Tell us what camera and lens you shot on, what formulas you used and how you processed. I can't wait to see what you create. If you're pumped. Let's get into it and start shooting. 2. Myth-Busting: Welcome to the Hollywood panorama, the exact workflow used in Hollywood today to create high dynamic range 360 panoramas. Let's start by busting some myths. I think is really important that we tackle some of these misconceptions out there. Just so we go into this with the right mindset. First, one being that you need expensive equipment to shoot 360° panoramas. That is simply not true. You can shoot 360's on just about anything these days. Cheaper devices like the Ricoh Theta shoots 360's quite easily and a multitude of other devices. The difference being we want to shoot high-quality 360 panoramas and that you can do with any camera. You can do it on a full-frame. You can do it on aps-c. It really doesn't matter. And you can do it on multiple different lenses. That is in fact how we get higher resolution 360's is by using different lenses. So the fact that you need expensive equipment not true. You can shoot it with whatever you have. And then brings us to the second part of this, which is the misconception that you'd need an 8mm lens to shoot 360 panoramas. That also is not true. In fact, we rarely use an 8mm to shoot 360° panoramas in the film industry, we only ever use it HDRI's, which is to replicate onset lighting. But when shooting 360 panoramas to use for image-based lighting, texturing your environments, and a multitude of other things. Clean plates. We use a full-frame body at either 24mm, 35mm or 50mm. So you can use any lens that you already have. Primes are ideal, but a Zoom will do just fine. So again, can shoot it on any camera and any lens. Another misconception out there is that you need expensive software. Again, is also not true. I'll show you how to do the entire process with free software. From merging your HDR to stitching your panoramas, to applying them in 3D image-based lighting, all with free software. Another big one is the idea that it takes years to learn how to shoot high dynamic range 360 panoramas. That is not true because you can really learn all of these basic skills in a day. I've taught people how to do this in a single day. And finally, the idea that it's very complicated and convoluted to shoot 360 panoramas. This course, this workflow will prove the opposite. The way we shoot things are preparation. The way we process things makes it so simple that anybody can do it. So ultimately, I think what we want to convey is that if you can shoot high-quality 360 panoramas with whatever gear you have with free software that you can learn to do it rather quickly, to perfect it, you're going to have to practice, of course, to improve on your skills. But ultimately, you can go out there and shoot high dynamic range 360 panoramas the moment you complete this course. So let's jump right in and have a look at the workflow. 3. Workflow Overview: Alright, here we are, The Hollywood Workflow. So let's have a quick overview of what it actually consists of. Part one is going to be our core principles. We're going to cover exposure rules, not just in relation to 360 panorama photography, but things you can use in all your photography needs. We're also going to cover HDR photography, what it is and why we use it. And then we're going to cover some 360 panorama details in terms of what it is. Again, why do we use it? We're gonna go into our preparation. So we're going to look at the exact kit that you need. We're going to give you an example or a quick view of the kit that I use. And then we're going to also look at finding your nodal point. So how to find your nodal point with your lens and your camera combination. We are also going to look at your shooting angles and the exact formula you need to create a 360 panorama with the amount of overlap. Not only that, I'm actually going to give you the exact formulas that we use in the industry every single day. In part three, we're actually going to shoot. We're gonna go out and do a hands-on walkthrough on shooting your panoramas with different lenses in different environments. And in part four is going to be our processing. From offloading your cards and some handy tips and tricks there to your file naming stitching panoramas both in paid and free software, and then prepping it in terms of color correction, moving a tripod, and prepping it for application, which is part 5 - application, how to use it in 3D image-based lighting or IBL, virtual reality, Google Street View, all the really fun things. So let's dive right into it. Core principles. 4. Preparation: Core Principles Exposure: Alright, let's look at some core photography principles. And the only reason I really want to cover this is because it is quite important to shooting high-quality 360 panoramas. If you wanted to shoot just cheap and easy panoramas, you would have done a different course. So we're going to focus on quality. And for that reason, we just need to touch on these core principles. If you're taking this course, I actually assume that you are already quite familiar with your camera and exposure. But if there's something to learn and I think there always is, let's have a quick look at it. So exposure in simplest terms, is of course, how much light reaches your sensor. Exposure is controlled by three things. The f-stop, the ISO, and the shutter speed, also referred to as the exposure triangle. And it's really easy to picture it in that way because as you change one, it affects the other two. So let's have a look at your f-stop first. As you probably know, the lower the f-stop, the wider your lens is open, which means it allows more light into your sensor. With that, you get beautiful depth of field, which is lovely, right? It's when things close to us is in focus and the rest is out-of-focus, creating a lovely blur. So it's quite artistic. However, for 360 panorama photography, it's not that great. We want everything to be sharp and in focus. So we want our f-stop to be higher. You want to be aware that each lens has a specific point where the sharpest. And so you can go into Google and have a look at your particular lens. Someone would have reviewed it. And we tell you where the sharpest point is. As a general rule, we want our f-stop to be never lower than F5.6. And that's really if you're in a very dark environment and you're pushed for time. So we never want to go below F5.6. And some lenses tend to break down around F16. So you might think just when you're outside, you just wanted to pop it up to F22, F16, whatever it may be. And again, I recommend that you actually look at your sharpest point for your particular lens and pop it in there. So as a general rule, 360 panoramas would be around F8/F11, That's a nice little sweet spot. But again, it really does depend on your environment, your set, your lighting situation. Because whatever we set that up obviously affects the other two items. Now let's have a look at our ISO. The lower the ISO, the darker the image is, the higher the brighter, more light into our sensor. The issue with the ISO is that it introduces noise. So we never really want to push your camera beyond that point. So each camera has its own native ISO. For instance, Sony cameras, and particularly your S range. They have a very high ISO range. You can push them into the thousands without introducing noise. Others you can't push past 200. So we want to find that sweet spot again for your particular camera. And knowing where you really start introducing noise. For my 5DSR, ideally, I'd like to have my ISO around 320 as it's a native. But I'd never, ever really push it past 640, which is not that high. Really. Particularly if again, if you're in a low light situation and you're pushed for time, that's not very high at all. So another way we can now rectify this, if for instance we have an F8 and we have an ISO of 320 is our shutter speed. Shutter speed is actually going to be a main adjustability function when shooting 360 panorama. So shutter speed in the simplest terms, obviously, it's got to do with speed. It is the speed at which the shutter of the camera closes. And so we have to consider the speed of things around us. If things are moving very quickly, you want your shutter speed to be higher, faster. Another thing is you really need to learn to understand and trust your histogram. Don't trust your monitor or your display because it's never really accurate. So learning to understand your histogram and really trust it is essential. The easiest way to remember it, if you're new to histogram, is right, is white. And if you're looking at your histogram on the right-hand side is going to be all your whites, meaning your highlights. You've got your midtones in the middle, and then you have your shadows on the left. When setting up initially, we're always expose for the middle bracket, right? So when doing that, we don't want to clip the highlights and we don't want to clip the shadows either. So you'd want a histogram with a nice little mountain in the middle. Another cool trick when exposing is using your depth of field preview. If you're camera, got this, It's this little button up here. And that's really cool because it shows us our lowest bracket, which is just a quick way to really check your exposure. And then I'll show you some cool bonus tricks using a color chart to help with your exposure as well as some of the basics. And again, you can apply this to any and all photography. It could be portrait photography, can be landscape, it could be absolutely anything. Another cool thing you can do to help you understand these basic exposure principles, a jump online and have them look at some cameras simulators. There are plenty of them on the Internet. So you just jump on there and play around with your ISO, your shutter, your f-stop to really get a nice grasp of your basic camera settings. So it is important that we understand these core principles because we're here to learn how to shoot quality HDR panoramas. So let's go into it and let's talk about HDR photography. Why do we use it? And what is it? 5. Preparation: HDR Photography: Alright, high dynamic range photography, or HDR, in the simplest terms, means you're bracketing and image at different exposures and merging it into one image. That is so that we capture the entire tonal range. So you can shoot brackets anywhere from three brackets to nine. You can shoot as many as you like. As a general rule of thumb, we always exposed for our middle bracket and that particular bracket, we don't want our highlights to clip and we don't want our shadows to clip either. So it takes us back to our core exposure principles. So you're going to expose when setting up your camera for that middle bracket. And you're going to decide how many stops apart your other brackets are. You can be anywhere from one-stop apart, 23 in anywhere in-between, right? For our purposes, we usually shoot three brackets and three stops apart. It gives us the biggest range of exposures at the least amount of time for three-sixteenths panoramas, we tend to shoot three, particularly if you're shooting on a camera with a high pixel count, that's all we really need. Because it's much quicker. And particularly when you're outside and you're shooting in an environment that things are moving really quickly, like the window and the sun and clouds or onset, honestly always have a lot of time constraints. So we wouldn't have the highest quality or the least amount of time. We shoot. Three brackets, three stops apart. So why do we use high dynamic range photography? It is particularly useful to capture the entire tonal range of a scenario, and particularly important when capturing high contrast situation. So I'll show you an example here. For instance, in this particular example, we are trying to capture the beautiful exterior as well as this beautiful old interior of this house, like I mentioned, are set up to my middle bracket and then we'd shoot or low bracket. As you can see, the entire interior is completely underexposed, but the exterior is exposure. We can retain all the highlights. Then our middle bracket is a lovely combination of the two. And then our high bracket, our exterior is completely blown out. But recapturing our interior on the left. If you were not to shoot bracketed or high dynamic range, That's what your image would look like. But if you short bracketed and you merged it into an HDR photo, you would get this beautiful thing which would have All the value of the Interior as well as the exterior. This is particularly important when shooting 3 16th photography. And again, you can shoot 360 panoramas with a single image. You don't have to bracket it. You can still shoot it through 60 panorama and you can choose to either focus on just the Hague child photography part of this course. We can just skip straight to the three-sixths panoramas. But again, we're here for high-quality, right? This is why you're here. And that's what the HDR is important because in most cases, you want to capture absolutely everything so that they could use it in visual effects or whatever. It might be. Some basic rules for HDR photography, as we say, it's bracketed. Now one rule, shoot it on a tripod. Because again, you want to merge those 379. How many brackets you're shooting want to merge them into one? If there's even the slightest movement in between them is going to have a really hard time stitching in. If you're shooting a lot of brackets and you're, you're, you're slower brackets given your situation is a slow shutter speed, things are going to move. So you want to shoot on a tripod at the sequence of bracketing as well, we usually tend to shoot our fastest bracket first and then work the other way because you can set your camera up to shoot or this slow brackets first and reverse it. And the reason why we shoot the fastest bracket first is to avoid any shape. So we want to get that first shutter that's quicker first, Hopefully you, your tripod is settled by the time you slowest shutter comes in. And we always want to shoot in manual. Always, always, always. So whatever your camera habit doesn't matter, there's always a manual mode. And the reason for this is we don't want our exposure focus to change during our brackets. We want it to be exactly the same so you can just merge them all in one. We're going to expose for the middle bracket. Like I've mentioned probably several times. We're going to expose for the new bracket. And then when shooting you're always, you can use your depth of field preview button like I talked about earlier. And you can check your close bracket or just shoot it and actually look at it. That's our basic rules. Shoot it on a tripod or issued manual exposed for your middle bracket. And then don't clip your highlights in that middle bracket and then cloaked, unclip your shadows. That's the ideal exposure or application of HDR photography. Certainly the effects world we shoot, HDRI, which is usually a shot onset with an eight mil lens. And that is purely to capture the lighting environment and that gets used in image-based lighting. Really what we want here is the quickest and the most values, right? So the whole crew concept there waiting for us while we shoot at 24 male higher risk panorama at this point. So we thrown 8 million and we should seven brackets. So that's one way we use HDR photography. Another one obviously is the one we will be focusing on this course, and that is high-quality panoramas. And that is used again for image-based lighting. In conjunction with the HDRI and then the silver bowl, we use all these tools for image-based lighting. It's not just one of them. But then our high-quality panoramas that we'll be focusing on today. That gets used for clean plates, that gets used for image-based lighting, like I mentioned. It gets used to texture environments when you're aligning it tonight or photogrammetry. So this really a multitude of ways these panoramas get used and why they need to be really high-quality. Hdr gets used in photography if you just want to shoot landscape or you have a cool scene like for instance, this old house with this beautiful exterior, you want to use HDR photography. So now that we have a basic understanding of HDR photography, high dynamic range photography, let's jump in to the 360-degree panorama section, understanding what the difference is and how we apply them. 6. Preparation: Panoramic Photography: Alright, so now that we have a basic understanding of the high dynamic range HDR component of our course in 306 degree high dynamic range panoramic photography. I know it's a mouthful. We're going to cover the 360 panorama part. And like I mentioned earlier, we have HDR component and you have 360 panorama components. And you can do one without the other. You can shoot your panoramas without HDR and vice versa, you can shoot HDR. Is that any type of photography? Now, it's important to make the distinction between a normal panorama or tile and if 360 panorama. And the big difference here is a panorama or tile only covers a certain degree of field of view or angle. So it might only cover a 140 degrees or a 180 degrees. Were 360 panorama, as you can imagine, covers entire 360 degrees, including the ground plane. And it's quite plain so that you can create a virtual environment. In the simplest terms, it's always the easiest. I think if you tell people to think of Street View because that's really what it is and also can be used to that. It all a panorama, a tile 360 panorama. They're all a set of images shot from the nodal point at a predefined formula and then stitched together. So that's the biggest difference between panoramas and 360 panoramas, again, can be shot with high dynamic range of a single, single brackets. In this particular course, we're going to cover high dynamic range panoramic photography because again, we're here for Hollywood quality. So some basic rules for 3 16th panoramic photography. Always shoot it from a tripod or she'd manual and always shoot from the nodal point. We're going to cover how to find your nodal point in later lecture. But for now those are some basic things that we always remain the same regardless of shooting a 180 degree planner or a 360 panorama bubbles fear whatever you want to call it. So those are some basic rules that always apply. Some applications for the 360 HDR panorama in the film industry and in particular the effects industry. We use these for high-quality image-based lighting. We'll show you how that's done later on. We can also use it to texture environments really quickly by aligning it to the LIDAR or photogrammetry, would we use it for clean plates? We use it to clean out gear and people we do large environment captures using these things you can do, fly through some entire set in an environment using there. So it's really, it's such a staple of what we do in visual effects actually are their applications is virtual reality, real estate, virtual tours, Google Street View, little planet, showing off to your mates, your cool photography skills all in all, I think it's a really cool skill set and it has many, many applications and I think I'll only grow in its usability in the future. Hopefully you're excited because what's happening is our preparation list again. 7. Preparation: Gear Requirements: Alright, so let's have a look at some basic gear or kit that you're going to need to be able to shoot 360 panoramas. You need a camera. Of course, it can be full frame, it can be a crop sensor, it doesn't matter. You'll need an interchangeable lens. It can be a Zoom, but prions are ideal. You will need a tripod, ideally a steady one, but whatever you have will do the trick just the same. Then you'll need a panoramic head. There are multiple brands out there, so it doesn't matter which one you have or get. Just make sure that you understand the way that specific one works. The general rules will apply regardless. Then additionally, you will need a shutter release cable. If you don't have this, it's not a problem. We will use a 2 second timer to set up your shutters or 2 second time it does that automatically sets of your brackets if you have three or seven or nine, which means you press it once and you don't have to continue pressing the button. The shutter release cable does something similar. Then lastly, a color chart. Again, this is not an essential piece of equipment, but we use it to color balance, color match. Then we also use it to expose, which is a neat trick that I'll show you later on. Alright, so let's have a look at what's in my bag. And you'll note that I've mentioned bag. The reason why I use a backpack instead of a pelican case is because you're always on the move in strange environments on a beach, on a mountain, and then lugging a big Pelican case is very difficult. So make sure you have a nice backpack. They can put all your gear in safely and can ideally carry everything. And that will make your life a lot easier, right? So let's jump in and have looked at what's in the bag. 8. Preparation: What's In My Bag: Alright, so now that we have a good understanding of what gear we're going to need. Let's have a look at what's actually in my bag. And here it is. So let's go ahead and look inside. Alright, so this is a low pro Whistler, be P450, AW, two lovely bag. It's quite deep. It carries all my gear for me. Starting at the top. This is a Canon 35 mil F14. This is the Canon 5D is R. This is my workhorse. This is the sigma 24 mil F14. My remote switch. This is a Canon. Our SAT in three. Shutter release. This is my Nano ninja six. This is a Canon 72200 mil. F4, our series lens batteries. This is a Sigma 50 mil. This is a one-point for heartlands. In a 100 ml, this is a 100 mil macro. If two-point et al series. I just have my cards. This is a semi and 14 mill T3, 0.1 Sunni lens. And then my charger. So that is what's in my kit. I usually have another body but identity and carry it with me, it's in a different bag. I don't tend to carry the 14 Miller depends on what I'm doing. I have just some lens cleaner. Always keep your lens is clean. Filters, extra base plates, and then just front. Alright, so just in the front here. I have my color chart that's in there. I just keep this here to keep my colored chalk nice and straight. And then I just have a pocket color chart as well. And then just some Sharpies and then a torch if I'm working in dark environments so I can see my rotations. And that's what I use on a daily basis. This is my Manfrotto X1 90 Pro. And I just have a little bit of Velcro on it where I can stick my slate and my column chart. Right, so now that we know what gear you need and we've had a sneak peek inside my bag. Let's set up your camera. We're going to look at some basic camera settings, and we're also going to look at some panoramic specific settings. So let's go ahead and do that next. 9. Preparation: Camera Settings: Alright, so now that we've looked at the kid that's needed, Let's look at some settings. And I'm going to cover some really basic things. And like I mentioned with the start of the course, you might not think that it's particularly relevant. But believe me, these things really make a difference in the long run. Because if you set it up properly at the start, it really makes processing so much easier and you're just removing a lot of bugs. So let's have a quick look at some of the basic settings. Image quality. Make sure that it's set to RAW and JPEG large. And the reason we do that is because we want to preview our panoramas really quickly with our stitching very large raw files image review. I turn that off just to save my battery and to help the speed, I don't want to display an image every time I shoot a rotation beep. I have that disabled. We don't want any noise and set shutter release without card. Make sure that is off. We don't want to learn this lesson. The hard way all this does is this shutter will fire, even though you don't have a coordinates, are always make sure that is off regardless of what photography you do, any other settings on this doesn't really matter. Next, the exposure will set up on the day using our brackets saying without white balance, the only thing here is to make sure our color space is set to RGB. Next menu over a picture style, make sure that it's set to neutral. We don't want to bake in any specific color profile or contrast. So make sure that it's set to neutral. And then there's nothing else on this menu here. Nothing on this menu. Lobby shoot enable these modes you will change as well. I usually have a ping disabled. And then our grid display. I'm going to put it through breathy plus dialogue, which gives us the center cross hairs, which helps us align our nodal point when we point our camera down to the center of the nodal head. But you can choose any of these. Nothing on this menu, the autofocus menu, I usually leave as it is. There's nothing. I never shoot anything auto. This menu, there is nothing for us. Same here. Nothing for us to really change. This menu are holiday alert. I have it enabled. This helps us see which parts of our image are overexposed. And it also use it to check our exposure using a color chart. When a single white square is clipping. When this is enabled, that a good indication of a good exposure histogram. The histogram isn't set up. Just make sure that it's set to brightness and that'll display correctly. Record function. So this is where we create our new folders so that we shoot into a new folder. And we always shoot a panorama into a new folder. So things are very easy to manage when we start offloading and processing each panorama into its own folder. For our numbering continuous filename, you can set this up to whatever you want, like auto rotate. We want this off because we don't want the camera or the computer to import images, portrait, and landscape at the same time. So this enables us to stitch things properly and much quicker and without any drama. So this is important. Make sure that it's off, auto power off. You can choose to whatever you want. Brightness, I always leave manual because I don't want to deceive my eyes when I'm exposing. Make sure you set your date and time zone. This and shows that when importing our photos, everything is sequential, an incorrect order. Nothing for us to do here. Custom settings, I tend to use this when having outdoor and indoor scenarios, right? Our exposure level increments, make sure that's 1 third ISO settings 1 third bracketing order cancel on. And then our bracketing sequence always make sure that we shoot our fastest bracket first. And so that is why we select that one it shoots are darkest image first, just a faster shutter speed, then our middle, just the 0, and then our high bracket, which is usually a slower shutter speed to allow more light into the camera, creating our highest bracket. Number of bracketing shots, we will be using three when shooting a HDR on set will be seven. And you can shoot your panoramas using any of these. In our case, we will be using three brackets. Nothing for us here. Then our favorites menu, I always have my selecting my folders at the top because again, you will create a new folder for every single panorama. I have registering my custom shooting mode on my favorites menu to create scenarios for indoor and outdoor settings when having to move very quickly, highlight, alert, disable, and enable those to check my exposure. Format card always format a car before starting a new session. Lcd brightness, like I mentioned, is for moving indoors to outdoors and having to adjust your display number of bracket, It's shots three. And then another one over is my bracketing sequence if I ever wanted to change this. So that is a quick look at our settings that will really help us in post-production, enable us to shoot proper HDR panoramas. Okay, so we've set up our camera settings. Now we need to figure out the exact formula to enable us to shoot high-quality 360 panoramas. That means the amount of overlap you need per camera and per body. So if I'm shooting on a 24 melt and a full-frame body, it's going to be different than it 24 mill on a crop sensor body. Likewise, my formula for a 35-millimeter, 24 mill will be different. So let's go ahead and calculate those formulas. And then I'll also give you the exact full-frame formulas used every day. 10. Preparation: Shooting Angle Formula: Okay, So calculating our shooting angle or formula is essential in shooting 360 panoramas. If we do not do this, you won't have images overlapping and it won't be able to stitch the images. And the reason why it's important that we do this during the preparation stage is because you don't have time to do this when you're on location or onset and things are moving very quickly. Again, the reason we do things properly in the start will make the whole process so much easier. So you're shooting angle simply means the amount of overlap between your images. So each camera has a different formula. And what I mean by that, in particularly a full frame versus crop sensor camera, the overlap will be different the way a full-frame camera displays a 24 moles. As a crop sensor, 24 miles will be different. I'll show you several ways that we can actually calculate that. But as a general rule of thumb, you want at least twenty-five percent overlap and at a minimum 10%. And what that means in the simplest terms is when I shoot my first image and I rotate, let's say 40 degrees clockwise. One, my second image to have about twenty-five percent overlap or minimum tin so that our stitching software is able to pick up those same points and align them. With that. Our nodal point is key and we'll cover it in the next lesson. So not only do we have horizontal overlap, when shooting a full 360, we're trying to create a sphere, meaning I will have multiple rows and multiple columns. I'll have to shoot a row at, let's say 0 degrees. I'll have to shoot another at 45 degrees, whatever it may be so that we build the entire sphere. Once we put this into our stitching software will be quite easy to visualize the way it all stitches together. So having a formula will enable us to shoot more efficient and enables us to shoot a panorama that's stitches every single time. When calculating our shooting angle or our amount of overlap. Here are a few key things to remember. First one being that a full 360 panorama, in essence measures at 360 degrees horizontally and a 180 degrees vertically. And we'll use those numbers when calculating our overlap, 360, horizontal or vertical, to create a full sphere, always shoot up 90 degrees and down 90 degrees. And that's in order to capture the sky and the floor plane. When calculating the rows that we calculate, exclude this up and down rotation. This will make a bit more sense once we get into it, but it's worth noting at the start. And then the way our panoramic heads or setup will be different. But for this case and for these examples, it is set up as follows. My head rotates horizontally at ten degrees and vertically, it rotates at increments of 7.5, but it's setup to rotate at 15. So those are worth remembering once we start calculating. So let's jump onto the computer and have a look at some online calculators. First I'm being kind of catches it. You're going to do is you are going to select your camera. You either select a APOC, which is a crop sensor camera, will select a forefront. For our purposes, we will go full-frame sensor width and a height that should be included automatically. But if you're in doubt, you can always google the full-frame sensor size. And you'll see that it's 24 by 36 mill. You can see 245359 close enough. Your lens type. For our purposes, we will be using prime lenses. If you're shooting on an eighth note, we will select fisheye, but in our scenario we will be using a normal lens focal length. You will input this manually. We will go 24 mill for our coverage. We want a full 360 or overlap 25. You can go ahead and change that, but let's go 25. Generate shooting pattern, right? It looks like nothing has happened. Just scroll on down. Okay, So the horizontal field of view for this lens is 53 degrees and vertically it's 73 degrees. And with twenty-five percent overlap, that's adjusted to horizontally, Let's call that 40 degrees, that 3985 and vertically 55. For the formula, it is suggesting that we shoot horizontally ten positions and vertically five, so ten horizontally and five rows, row one. In this example, we would be at 72 degrees upwards and we've chewed for positions. And then row two would be at 36 degrees upwards, and we should nine positions. As you can see, it can be a little bit convoluted. And it's going to take you a while to shoot a 24 mil. But do not fret because I'm going to give you the fastest formula out there. You will never look back, so standby. But for explanation purposes, let's have a look at these websites and calculators so you can go through and figure it out yourself. The next one we'll be using is PAN-OS society. So this one is quite simple because it's just a table. So I'm going to go and zoom in there. So let's say we're shooting full-frame camera and we're shooting portrait mode. We want 360 panoramas. And let's say we're shooting on a 24 mil. And so this is more accurate and fast. You'll be shooting nine shots at 40 degrees. So that means you're rotating horizontally 40 degrees, which is 940 times 9360 degrees. And then landscape, we won't really be using landscape at all. So what this does is lovely, That's very accurate, but it only gives us a single row and we want to create a full 360. So we're going to have to duplicate that. We're going to have to shoot at least two rows. And that means you have twenty-five percent overlap between your horizontal images. And it also have 25 degrees overlap between your vertical images between these two rows. Let's have a look at the next one. The panel calculator from HDR labs is another good one to use. So this one, you can either select a lens from the drop-down or you can type it in manually. Let's go Eight mil. And our common films size, we'll leave that as 36 by 24 because that's our full frame sensor size. But you can also change that too. If you want to go and eat candy 17th, that'll be different because it's a crop sensor. Let's go with 35 mil film. Alright, so we're going to calculate our field of view. Once you hit that, it'll show us our vertical field of view and a horizontal field of view. We'll use those in a moment to help us calculate our rows. But let's go ahead and calculate our panorama. We're going to say we want twenty-five percent overlap. We're going to calculate. And it is suggesting that we shoot 4.3 images. So number of images for 0.3. So let's have look for images is 20 per cent from our account online calculator. It suggests that we should, for rotations or four positions. So if you want to know the amount of degrees you're rotating for that for positions, it is as simple as 360 degrees divided by four equals 90, so it'll be rotating at 90 degrees. So the more complicated one is to find our number of rows, which is this 132 degrees. So we're going to use that 132 degrees and we're going to divide it by a 180. So it's 1.3, meaning that it merely covers our full 180 degrees field of view. So we need one row. And if you want to see the amount of degrees you'll be tilting. Take the 132 vertical field of view times one row, gives us a hundred and thirty two hundred and thirty two plus then another 132 because you'll be rotating up 90 degrees. Remember we said we don't count those when we calculate the initial number of rows, but you will be adding it. So plus 132 gives us 264 degrees. So tourist 64 obviously is more than a 180, so we're going to minus 118 and gives us 84 degrees. So that is what it's suggesting, that we tilt. Our head, doesn't rotate at those degrees. So our next closest one is 90 degrees. If you want to make sure that that is still enough overlap, it is as simple as 90 plus 9080 degrees. So we know that if I shoot my first row at 0 and the next one at 90 up, it'll be enough overlap, right? So we're going to select 24 mill in our lens. And we're gonna go calculate. Alright, so our vertical field of view is now changed to 73 degrees. And we're going to calculate our panorama. That is our first step. So first thing we wanna do is calculate the number of images we need to create our first 360 rotation and then we calculate the rest from there. So nine images is what it's suggesting. 360 divided by nine equals 40 degrees. So we'll be shooting non positions and rotating at 40 degrees horizontally. Work out the amount of rows. We are going to take the vertical field of view, which is 73.74, so we can round that up. So the vertical field of view is 74 degrees. A 180 degrees vertically divided by 74 is 2.4, meaning we need two rows in order to create a 1A2. Obviously we're a little bit short, but we'll fix it with the additional top and bottom 90 degrees. So now if we want to figure out the amount of tilt between the rows, we will take our vertical field of view 74 degrees times two rows equals a 148. Then we add another position which is 74 degrees up, gives us 222. And that's the additional top 90 degree position right about the field of view of that image is 74 degrees. Then to figure out our tilt angle, we're going to take the 220 minus one AT, and it gives us 42 degrees, right. So our next closest position on her head because our head doesn't rotate it 42 degrees is 45. And to check that 45 times two equals 90 plus 45 again, for that top one, it gives us a 135. So in this particular case, we do not have enough overlap, meaning we need to add another row to get us 21845 degrees times three rows equals 135 plus 45 for that top 90 degree position equals a 180. So that is how we get to 45 degrees tilt in-between. Alright, so 35, calculate and calculate, right? So it is suggesting 12.7 images. So let's go with, in this case, for our 35-millimeter to find out horizontal rotation, it's 360 divided by 12 that the calculator gave us 30 degrees. They will take our vertical field of view and round that up to 55 just to make it easier. So then we take 180 degrees divided by 55 equals 3.2. So we need three rows in order to achieve the a 180 degrees. So to find out the amount of degrees between the rows will take off vertical field of view of 55 times three is 165. Then we add our top positions, which is another 55 degree of field of view. And that gives us two hundred and twenty two twenty minus 180 is 40 degrees. Obviously, our head doesn't tilt to that degree. So our next closest one is 45 degrees times three is 135. Add your top position and then gives you a 180 degrees. So in other words, we need 45 degrees tilted between arrows and we need three rows. So let's have look at a 50 mile. Go calculate, calculate. Alright, so number of images is 17.8. So we're going to round that up to 18360 degrees divided by 18 equals 20 degrees. So we'll rotate 20 degrees between these 800s positions. We're going to take our vertical field of view, which is 39.6. We'll call that faulty. And we'll calculate the amount of rows. So vertical field of view, 39 degrees a 180 divided by 39 gives us 4.6. So around that up to five rows, we will need five rows in order to create a full 360 panorama using a 50 mille to figure out the amount of tilt between these rows, we'll take our vertical field of view 39 times five equals one over five, plus another 39 for that top position equals 234234 minus 1 eighth is 54 degrees. So our next closest one will be 45 degrees. 45 times five. Again, this is just if you want a sanity check yourself, you figure out how much overlap you're actually shooting gives us two to five. Plus again, that top position is to 70. So at 45 degrees, we're shooting way more overlap than we actually need. So let's bring that down. We'll go to our next position on our rotation, which is 30 degrees. 30 times five rows is 150 degrees. Your top position of 30 degrees, and that gives you 180. So in other words, we will need five rows, will be rotating 30 degrees in between those rows. So let's put in a 100 mills will go calculate our field of view and calculate a panorama. So the number of images is 35. So 360 degrees divided by 35 equals ten degrees. So we will rotate ten degrees in between are 35 positions. So we're gonna take our vertical field of view of 20 degrees. You're going to divide it by 180 and it gives us nine rows. And again, you're not really going to shoot a full 360, but we still want to figure out the amount of degrees of tilt between your rows and we need the amount of rows to calculate that. So 20 degrees times nine is a 180. Plus. Then again, your top guy, which is another 20 degrees, is two hundred two hundred minus 18020 degrees. And again, our next closest rotation on her head is. 15 degrees. Alright, so we've had a look at some online calculators. Now, let's go through and look at the Hollywood formula I'm getting give you the exact overlap formula used in Hollywood every single day. First one being our eight mill fish islands. It is the quickest way to get the lighting scenario, which gets used in conjunction with our Chrome and silver balls to create image-based lighting. We also combine that with the high dynamic range, three-sixths panoramas, there'll be captured at a later stage, the H2RAs with an eight mille is there for speed. We don't want the entire crew waiting for us while we shoot a high dynamic range, 24 mil Pena. So we shoot at eight, no HDRI. We'll look at a safe formula of doing this and creating a full 360 sphere. So we're gonna be shooting three rows, 90 degrees horizontally, and it will be a total of 56 images. And when you're done, your first rotation will be at 0 degrees. We're going to rotate four positions or four times at 90 degrees. So you'll start at 0, shoot yourself in brackets. Rotate 90 degrees to 90. She just seven brackets wrote at another 90 degrees to 180. Shoot that, wrote it horizontally. Another 90 degrees, talk to 70. Then you're going to rotate back to 0. You're going to tilt your head up 90 degrees. And we're going to capture two positions here. You're going to shoot the first one at 0. You're going to rotate it 90 degrees and shoot that one as well. Then you'll rotate back to 0. Rotate your head down or tilt your head down. We'll shoot the first one, add to 0. And then again, similar to the one we shot up at the sky, you'll rotate 90 degrees clockwise and shoot that guy. So let's have a look at our Hollywood formula. This one is a lot quicker like I mentioned, because we're pressed for time went on set and it has about 10% overlap. You're gonna go full-frame sensor eight mil lens, seven brackets apart. We want to get as much dynamic range as possible. And we usually tend to shoot two and two-thirds stops apart, but you can adjust this for onset photography or HD ours, we usually shoot only one row and we should 120 degrees horizontally, and it's a total of 21 images. We rotate up 7.5 degrees. Remember that our increments on our head. And then we shoot at 120 degrees horizontal. So we should add 0, one, twenty, two, forty, and then that's it. That's how you shoot your HDRI, the quickest way possible. The 24 mil panorama. We're actually going to do a hands-on walkthrough as well. But I'll give you an example of a safe version of shooting this panorama. You chewed 45 degrees down than 0, then 45 degrees upwards, and then you'll shoot 9090. So that's a very, very safe method of shooting a panoramas because you have a lot of overlap in, cannot go wrong doing that. The one I'm gonna give you is the fast and efficient Hollywood one. That is simply 30 degrees down at 40 degrees horizontal. So do nine positions. And then you'll do 30 degrees up at 40 degrees and 90 degrees. 0, rotated 90 and she'd another one up. And then you're going to repeat the process by pointing down 90 degrees at 0 and at 90. And that is as simple as that is a total of 66 images. And it's very, very quick. We should have three brackets, three stops apart. So that formula will probably change your life for the good. I'm actually going to give you the 35 mil fifty million, eight hundred million formula as well. So 35-millimeter going to rotate 30 degrees horizontally. And you're gonna do Forty-five down, 045 up the 1990s, down 191950 mille is gonna be 20 degrees horizontally. And then you're gonna go 60 degrees down at 20 degrees horizontally. Thirty zero, thirty up, 60 up. And then you're gonna go 1990 minus 90, minus 90. And then a 100 mil formula. Obviously, much tighter lens, less overlap. So a 100 mile, you'd never really shoot I full 360 sphere, Ruth, just because it'll take so long and the file size would be giant, enormous. So we usually only shoot gigapixel tiles with 100 mil, meaning you should ten degrees horizontally and 15 degrees vertically. So you'd perhaps should a mountain or a cliff side and you'll shoot it at 0, rotate ten degrees, 203040. You'll rotate up 15 degrees and then you'll tell back the other way. And so you'll be at 4030200 and you'll create however many rows you need to shoot your interest. Okay, So that is how you calculate your specific camera and lens shooting angle formula. And you can either use the online calculators we walked through or you can use the formulas I've given you. The reason we do this in prep is because you never have time to do this onset and we want to shoot efficiently and with high-quality. So you have a guaranteed stitch every time. And if you stick to this formula, that is what you'll get. It'll also make our processing side of things very, very simple. So make sure you write this down where you have them on your phone and keep them really close by. And that is going to make all the difference in the end. The next thing we're gonna do is find our nodal point and we're going to cover some theory. And then we're gonna do a hands on walkthrough on how to find you another point. So let's go ahead and do that. 11. Preparation: Nodal Point Theory: Okay, so we've covered the basic gear requirements and we've covered the basic settings. So now let's get into the nitty-gritty, which is quite essential, and that is finding the nodal points. So I'm going to teach you how to find the nodal point for your camera and your lens process is absolutely the same, I guess. So the first thing we should really cover is what is a nodal point? I'm not sure we hear this term all the time. So let's have a quick look at what that means. So the nodal point or the note parallax point is simply place in the lens where all the light converges and it crosses over. So in simple terms, it means that the foreground objects and background objects, a line in a simple way to check this is just to use the thumb trick, right? So our eyes aren't nodal. As you can see the distance from each other. They're not right in the center. So if you hold up your thumb and you close one eye, and then the other, it will appear as if your thumb has lived. Go ahead and try that. So that is the simplest way to explain. Nodal point or no parent x points are that is parallax. So for panoramic photography, we want the camera to spend on that nodal points so that things align. Not just to stitch, but to create a high-quality and sharp image. So if we have our cameras nodal, our foreground and background objects will overlap at the exact point. So this is an example of a good alignment. When set of images are shot from the nodal point, it aligns properly. This is an example of a bad alignment. So these images are not shot from the nodal point, which means that when we rotate horizontally, we are not aligning on this same set of pixels, if you will. So you can see it's misaligned quite severely. There's two sets of books, There's two candles that chair split into. That's why it's important that we should find the nodal points so things align and we get a nice crisp image. Alright, so before we jump into the hands-on walkthrough on how to find your nodal point. Here are just a few basic rules. You're going to set up your camera with your chosen lens on a tripod and level it. And the goal is to find your nodal point for your body, which is on the a bar. And you do that simply by pointing down your camera and 90 degrees at the center market. Once you've found the nodal point for your body, that'll always be the same. Then we want to find the nodal point position on the B bar, which is the top one. And that we do by again placing an object in the foreground and one in the background. And then moving your camera left and right and seeing the amount of parallax, and then you correct it, but either moving your camera forward or back on that B bar. So those are the basic principles for finding your nodal point. Set it up on a tripod level. It find your body nodal point by pointing it down on the center. And then find your lens nodal point by aligning two objects in the foreground and the background. Alright, so let's go do it. Let's go do a hands-on walkthrough on how to find your nodal point. 12. Preparation: Nodal Point Walkthrough: Alright, welcome back. We are going to do a hands-on walkthrough on how to find your nodal point. We're just going to take our tripod, set it up, remove our standard HD, which might be your pen until Ted, just twist that off. Your panoramic head usually comes in two pieces, especially when he's sitting it up for the first time. You're a bar or sometimes referred to as the x-bar, is going to come with the rotator and we're going to just tighten that onto our screw on the tripod. Make sure you tighten these knobs really nice and well, so we get a tight fit on a tripod. We don't want the actual head spinning off the tripod once we start rotating. Just going to listen that so I can twist. And now we're going to add our b-bbar. Nice way to know which way to actually place it. You always want your loosening knob on the outside. I'm also reading the numbers that'll face me. So the numbers will face me. So I'm just going to pop that guy on. I am going to tighten it. When I loosen this guy. This will be it. This is what your pen ahead will look like. And we're always going to place the camera with the lens facing forward. So a bar down the bottom on the rotator, V bar, also referred to as the x and y. So we are going to find our body nodal point using this guy here. We're going to push it forward and back. And we're going to find a lens nodal point using this guy here, back and forward. Okay, So let's throw a camera on this pen ahead and start finding our nodal points. I have a Canon 5D SR and a sigma 24 mils. So we'll start with that guy. I'm just going to tighten it onto this Vbar. At any position. We want to make sure that if your head has been that it's nice and level at the back, we don't want to actually tighten the body onto the head off balance so we wanna make sure it's nice and flush at the back. So first things we want to do when finding an adult point and when shooting a panel is we want to make sure we actually bubble our tripod. So we're gonna go ahead and do that. Alright, so we have a nice and bubble. I have a bubble on this head as well as on this tripod. Two parts to finding your nodal point versus finding your body nodal point, which is on the a bar and then your lens now point which is on the B bar. So for the body nodal point, we're just going to point our camera down onto our center and find the center of our body. And then for the length 0, we're actually going to take two items and line them up. And then align our camera with that and rotate left and right to find our lens saddle point. So we'll get into that in a moment. Let's start with the body. Once you have your body nodal point, it will always remain the same. If I'm shooting on this camera regardless of what lens I actually put on it, this marking down here will always remain the same. So that's nice. Once you have that for your body, you can always just look this guy in. Never really have to move it again. Make sure tripod is leveled. Tighten these guys down so there's no wiggle room. And then we're just going to turn our crosshairs on, on our display. That's going to help us align center. So I'll just go ahead and do that. So it's the three-by-three plus dialog. I'm going to rotate my camera and 90 degrees down. And again, remember there's must be leveled. And I'm going to turn my live view one. And I'm simply going to loosen this knob and slowly push it forward until my crosshairs line-up into the center of the head. You can always zoom in to help you out with that. That looks nice. Alright, so now we have to find our nodal point for our lens. We can add align two objects, one closer to the camera foreground, and the one further away, which is in background. And we're going to move our camera left and right to see the amount of parallax and then fix it using this guy up here. Usually you can use whatever you have around you. Two light stands to see stance, a toothpick and a building and the distance, you just need two straight lines so that you can tell the amount of parallax. So I'm just going to use what I have available to me, which is the coat hanger. And then just this little arm that I have, I'm just going to clamp it to a chair and use it as my foreground object. And this is my background object. And this is where it's a little bit more complicated to get your nodal point. It's certainly a little bit more convoluted than finding your body. No point. But it's actually not that hard at all. So let's do that. So I've aligned a foreground object and background object, and I've just learned my camera up so I can see both objects. I'm going to use my live view and we use the zoom function. And I'm going to punch right in. And I'm going to use my depth of field preview button to have a look at my alignments. And I can see that there's a sliver of wood on the left and on the right that I'm going to rotate left. I'm going to zoom in again. And you'll see that the width is moved. It's on the left and there's nothing on the right. Which means I am not on my nodal point. I'm going to rotate to the right. Zoom in. Here's my depth of field preview. You can see the woods on the right, so that's incorrect. So now I'm going to loosen this knob on this V bar and I'm going to pull my camera backwards until it looks like it is in the middle. Go back to the center. Zoom in. Chicken liver on the left sliver on the right. Left. Zoom in again. I probably come back just a little bit more. That looks lovely. Check the center. Check the right. And that is it. So we set up our tripod, we set up our panoramic head, we level it, we find our body nodal point by pointing it down 90 degrees and aligning it to the center of your head. Then we flick our camera back to 0 so it's completely parallel, again, making sure that everything is level. Then we place two objects, one foreground, one background. Or you can use something in the foreground of building in the background. You can use anything in our environments as long as they're both straight and you can align to them. And then we just wrote it our camera to the far left and to the far right to see the amount of parallax. And then we move our camera backwards and forwards on the B bar until those objects are perfectly aligned. And it is as simple as that. So you'll repeat that process for any loans and all your lenses. And like I mentioned, once you have your body nodal point on your a bar, that'll be the same. Remember to write these down because you don't want to have to do this when you're out on location or sudden you're trying to shoot a piano, you don't have time to do this things. And the difference between finding the nodal point in doing properly is you're gonna get a guaranteed stitch and he also going to get a much crisper image. So make sure you write those down and keep them on hand. So let's get into actually shooting pianos, which we're all here for. Very exciting. Here we go. 13. Shoot: Walkthrough: Alright, now that you have your nodal points and your markings and your formula, we are ready to shoot your panorama. So I have the 24 mill on my head. I have placed it at the correct markings on my piano head. So the first thing you ever wanna do is we want to make sure basically that our formula is accurate and to enable me to shoot 40 degrees because I'm shooting at 24 mil, I have to shoot fully degrees horizontally. So you'd worked out that using the calculator or using the formula that I've given you. I've set my rotator up to rotate at ten degrees, meaning it will click at ten degrees. So 1234, there'll be fully degrees. So you'll have rotators that have different degrees that it will rotate that. And most of them you can adjust. This one is just up here. And I can loosen this one here and then move it to any of our other points to rotate that. What do I have? 36 degrees, 60 degrees, 90 degrees, ten degrees works best for me because I can achieve my 40 degrees horizontally, but I can also achieve my 90 degree, which is an odd number. So something worth considering. Alright, so now that we've set up our nodal points, we're just going to extend our tripod all the way to want to be as high as possible. And then once we've done that, we always live on a tripod. It is the first thing and it's such a key thing that we do regardless if we're setting up for the first time today or if we're moving position, she always level your tripod first because it's really going to help with our alignment of our images. And again, just another example of how shooting properly saves you in the long run and make your post, post-production process so much easier. So I'm just going to level that guy real quick. So most heads and tripods will have little bubbles on them. So we just use that to level. The reason I want the tripod so high is because we're shooting 360. I'm obviously going to capture the floor plane, including the sky plane. And because they're closer to my tripod and to my lens, we don't want them to be soft, we want everything to be sharp. So focusing our cameras obviously essential, speaking of our height and having things close to us unfocused, including things far away from us. When shooting 360 panoramas. We want everything nice and sharp. So we want a higher F-stop. We don't want to introduce noise with a higher ISO. And so we're going to use our shutter speed to adjust. Predominantly. We can use lens lab, which is an app you can download. And within the app, we input what lens we have, what we have, and it'll give us our infinite focus meaning, things close to us will be in focus. Things far away from us will be in focus. This is a more specific way of setting your hyper focal. But it takes a bit more time. If I want to do that, I have to set my camera up. I'll input it into the app. And then I have to measure from my lens plain film plane distance. So for instance, if I've got five foot four as my hyperfocus for this lens and setting combination, I will measure it, set my focus autofocus to it, and then switch it back to manual and then leave it. So that'll be hyper folk for their skeletons. The problem is, if I change any settings, which in most cases you do because the environment around you changes all the time, then you have to redo that. So another way we do it, which I tend to use all the time, is to do it on the fly. So for this 24 mil, I am going to turn my live view one. I'm going to rotate down 30 degrees. I'm going to switch my autofocus on. And I'm going to navigate my autofocus to the center of the frame right on that cross here. And I'm going to focus and I'm going to switch back to manual. So you want to make sure when you do this that you are not focusing to your closest objects. You want to focus to something in the middle ground of your image or environment. That is how we achieve a high-profile call that shoot in Ninety-nine percent of the time should give you a hyper focal meaning, things close to us and things far away from us will be in-focus, right? So once you've labeled your tripod and you set its height, we're going to expose first things we want to do is setup our bracketing. And as we've discussed previously, we are always going to shoot three brackets, three stops apart. That is the nicest blend between speed and quality and giving us the highest dynamic range. Just set up your brackets on this candidate and it's just the little Q button. Press that once you can navigate using this toggle here, set. And now I'm going to rotate at this front, and I'm going to write it to the right. So that's three brackets, two stops apart, three stops apart. We've set our focus, we set up our bracketing, we've leveled our cameras, now we just need to expose. Alright, so we are going to use the histogram to expire. And some core principles that we touched on earlier. In this particular case, I am going to set my f-stop to, if I'm going to push my ISO to 400, it is a little bit darker in here because it's overcast outside. And I'm going to use my shutter speed to adjust. So we're exposing. There's a few things. Obviously when I'm facing down, my lighting is going to change, meaning my histogram is going to display differently. It's probably going to be a bit darker. So a good way to check an overall exposure is to go back to 0 on your nodal head. And they'll give you a more balanced view of your environment. And so I'm looking at this histogram and it's looking really lovely. I've got a nice mountain in the middle, which means there's a lot of midtone information. I'm not clipping my blacks and lock clipping my whites. You can also rotate throughout your scene and look at different parts of your scene or your environment and kind of get a better feel of what you're seeing because you might have a set, for instance, that's very overexposed one side and very dark than the other. So you one-on-one to try and find that middle ground. So speaking of exposure, once you're happy with your histogram and you call settings, meaning we don't have a too low f-stop and we don't have a too high ISO, and we've adjusted with a shutter speed gets thrown to get us the right exposure. We are going to use a color chart. If you don't have this, it's not the end of the world, but it is a lovely, lovely trick to expose. Obviously we use it to color balance, color match, and color, correct? But it is a cool little trick we use to expose as well. So when you turn your highlight alert on, you want your middle bracket that we expose for this white to be clipping. So we want a single wide square to be clipping when we have the highlight alert on. And so that is usually a very good indication of a well balanced and well exposed shot. We also want to place this down on the floor, me to no more than two meters away from us. And that is so we can see it and it's not too far away. And we want to place it down in the way it's going to get imported into our color correcting software. Meaning I don't want to place it down this way because I'm going to have to flip my image to match this color charts at placer down in the way it gets imported. And we'll look into this when we do our post-processing as well. So it'll make a lot more sense then I'm going to place this down. We just need our final touches, and that is going to be our shutter release cable. If you have one of these, wonderful, if you don't, you can still do this. You will just place your camera into 2 second timer. The reason we use a shutter release is to avoid any unnecessary shake when shooting our panoramas. We don't want to introduce any shake so that our images aren't blurred and they stitch together properly and get a really sharp image. And so there's always a little bit of movement from human interaction. So this negates that, including a 2 second timer just gives you a camera two seconds to rest before it goes. And then that also ties into the way we set up our bracketing sequence. We overshoot our fastest bracket first, again to negate any possible movement or shake from the head or human interaction. So first things first, always shoot each individual panorama into its own folder. So when you bring it in post-production, it's going to be incredibly easy to sort, rename and batch stitch. So create a new folder. Okay, so we've set our height, we have leveled our tripod. Everything is at the correct markings. According to our nodal point, expeditions earlier, we've said are hyperfocus, we've exposed. Bracketing sequence is ready. So we know our formula, 30 degrees down at 40 degrees horizontal, 30 degrees, 40 degrees horizontal. And then we're going to add 90 degrees up 090. And then we're gonna shoot to add minus 90, which is getting a 090. Let's do a quick walk-through. I'm going to write it down to 30 degrees, and I will release it three times using my trigger. Always make sure to stay behind your lens. Obviously, if you're outside or there's any bright lights, try and stay outside of the light so you don't cost any shadow onto your images because we don't want to paint that out to our first shot. It's always gonna be down because it's the easiest to identify and align. It will always have your color chart in your first frame. You would have heard it three times. I'm going to rotate clockwise. Always rotate in the same direction. If you want to rotate anticlockwise, please go ahead and new to you. But in most cases, we're going to rotate clockwise, whatever you choose to do, do it consistently do it every time. Not only does it help you on the day, it isn't extremely, extremely helpful thing when we batch stitch all our PAN-OS, right? So I'm going to rotate 40 degrees horizontally, and I've set it up to ten degrees. So it'll click four times 10203040. And I'm going to rotate to eighty one twenty one sixty two hundred 240 to 8320. Rotate back to 0. I won't shoot the 0 again because we already have that. If you wanted to sanity check yourself when you rotate up 30 degrees. Check how many images you have. New Folder, menu, folder select. And I should have exactly 27 images. So it's nine times three. And I'm going to do the exact same thing. I'm going to rotate 40 degrees little time. And then back to 0. Now I'm going to rotate up 90 degrees. So I'm at 0 on my rotator and I've rotated up 90 degrees is going to shoot three. Then I'm going to rotate 90 degrees clockwise. Rotate back to 0, and rotate down 90 degrees. For this one, we want to make sure we slip away from the camera, we hide behind the lens and we don't cause any shadows. We don't want to shoot your own feet because we're going to have to paint out this tripod in Christ. Rotate 90 degrees and height. Rotate back to 0. And check how many images go into your folder. And you should have exactly 66 images straight away. Once you've checked it, immediately create a new folder and you'll automatically shoot into it, meaning you're eliminating some mistakes. So that is how simple it is to shoot a full 360 HDR panorama using the Hollywood formula. And so you're going to repeat the process the same principles for your other lenses. In combination with the other formulas that you have, you're going to find your nodal points for those lenses. You're going to use the formulas either given to you or that you've calculated. And you're going to remember these core principles. Always level, hyperfocus, expose properly, and then shoot in a congruent formula every single time. And that will make your life so much easier. So let's jump into the computer and they sought processing these panoramas and see how we apply them, which is a lot of fun. Let's do it. 14. Processing: Overview: Okay, so let's have a look at our processing and we're gonna do an overarching overview of the steps involved. And I'm going to spell out the difference between a paid version and a free version. Or ultimately, if you shut properly and you created folders and camera as suggested, this whole process should be a lot quicker and more efficient. Let's have a look at our paid software. So the first step is gonna be to offload your card or ingest your data. You can either do that in your finder directly. We can use software like to Vinci resolve that has a checksum that literally confirms every bit of data has transferred across whichever way you choose to go. Most importantly is that you make sure you check your data sizes. So if it's two gig on your card, make sure it's two gig on your hard drive or computer wherever it may be. So we're going to ingest our data. Then we're going to do some file management. You might need to rename your folders and your files just to make it easier down the line. And you can either do that directly in Finder or you can do it in Adobe Bridge, which is a free software, which just makes it really easy to view your images. It loads and quite quickly. And you can rename everything in there. You can actually bulk rename as well, but I'll show you both versions. Then next we're going to look at merging your HDR is they will give you an example how to do that with just a single image and then also how to merge them for the panoramas. After that, we're going to stitch our panoramas in the paid version or paid workflow. Merging your H2RAs and stitching them happens in one software. We will be using PET gooey for that. It also does a really nice job of tone mapping, but we'll do that as an additional step regardless, the paid version you get a merge to HDR is you're going to stitch a panorama and you're going to do a little bit of a tone mapping all within one software. After that, we're going to turn that and we're going to color correct using Lightroom. And then we are going to remove the tripod as our final step in preparation for application. And once you've removed the tripod using Photoshop, you'll export it. Panorama is ready for application. So interesting, your data, file management, merging your history, your eyes, stitching a panorama, tone mapping, removing a tripod, and then export it for application. As simple as that, Let's have a look at our free software workflow. In essence, it's going to contain the exact same steps because that doesn't change the difference being there'll be a few additional steps because we're using different software that can do multiple things at once, like merging and stitching. So again, you're going to offload your card and you can either use Finder or Da Vinci Resolve. You're gonna do your farm management using Adobe Bridge. Then you're going to merge your HD, ours either with dark table or luminance HDR. And then you're going to stitch it. So the big differentiating factor happens here in the workflow. I found that a lot of the Free Software have a harder time aligning panoramas when trying to merge to HDR as well. So having, for instance, I found better results having merged and rotated my images prior to taking it into hugging to stitch my panorama. Hugging does have the option to merge and stitch at the same time. But like I said, I've really gotten very results. If you're using a software like auto stitch, it does not allow any user input. You can merge your mixture as he can rotate your images. So you have to do that prior in a different software like dark table. So you get a merger HDR hours, and then stitch them. So in essence, that process gets split into compared to PT GUI, where does it all in one? After that, we're gonna do the same thing we are going to map, we're going to color correct? You can use GIMP, you can use dark table, whatever image editing software you have or prefer. After that, we're going to remove the tripod, which we'll do in GIMP and we'll do a walk-through of that as well. The exact same way you're going to export your images for application. Those are the big differences between our paid workflow and our free software workflow. The steps are the same. There's just a few more in-between. Okay, So now that we have a nice idea of what the steps are and the differences between the paid and free version. I'm gonna do a quick comparison between the two. And the reason why I'm doing is because I put a lot of time in researching and trying and testing using free software when developing this course. And there were some painful times I'm not going to lie to you, so I thought I'll put my thoughts onto a page, then you can. Just look at it and make up your own mind. I'm also going to give you some recommendations of what software is out there. So I've done the research and I've just highlighted them here for you as well as prices for each of these software. So let's do a simple pros and cons between are paid and are free version of workflow. Pros for our paid workflow is that using software like PT GUI allows you to merge, stitch and tone map all-in-one application, which is a lot more efficient, which leads me into the next one. It is a lot faster and not only because you're reducing the amount of steps, but the software itself is a lot faster. You're also going to get more consistent quality results. And then the Batch Processor is a big bonus because when you're shooting large environments and sometimes you have big cashier doesn't have a 130 plus panoramas. You can sit there and individually stitch all of them. So having a batch process or a batch stitcher is very, very handy. Hugin, which is free, also has something but the results I've found very con, for our paid version of workflow is obviously the cost. So our free software biggest pro there is that it's free. And that's the biggest differentiating factor with that, you are compromising on certain elements. The first one being that there are simply just more steps within your workflow. You have to do more individual steps to get to your end result. So it is a bit more time-consuming. And in contrast, it also operates slower. The software itself is slower than for instance, you're paid versions and that's fine. That's a compromise. You also tend to give more errors and it's more labor-intensive to fix those errors. The user interface design just makes it a little bit more time-consuming. You also don't get as quality stitches. I've noticed and I've traveled many, many different versions and showed different panoramas, different formulas, and really get such a varied results. And that's a big one for me, is the consistent quality output. So those are the pros and cons, in my opinion, between the two versions, paid versus free software. Ultimately, you will be able to stitch and create high-quality panoramas using whichever version I just wanted to lay out the facts or at least my findings to you so you can make up your own mind. So let's have a look at some software suggestions. The paid version to merge your HDR. I use PT gooey. Like I said, this is a workhorse within my workflow. And the industries workflow as well. So PDQ emerges and stitches the panoramas and that's very, very helpful. It also does a really good job at merging the HDR as well. That will set you back about 175 US dollars. It's a onetime payment, which isn't really that bad. Then if you have Photoshop or Lightroom already as part of your toolkit, both of those actually merge to HDR, and that's 999 per month. Or if you go into Adobe Cloud, different bundles that will set you back a difference That's 999 US dollars per month for each of those. Then photo matrix is another one. That guy is a 129 US dollars. And then on the cheaper spectrum we've got easy HDR and that guy is 49 US dollars that are merging side. Let's have a look at our stitching sites. So PTU, again, you'll hear me say this multiple times, is in my opinion, one of the best stitches out there who just does a really fantastic job at auto the lining. It makes it easy to correct any errors. It has. Batch processing, it merges the HDR as well as time-lapse it. So definitely my number one recommendation for Panorama software. Photoshop and Lightroom both actually stitched panoramas as well. Photoshop tends to do a better job of this. In my opinion, lightroom creates a bit of HDR and in Photoshop actually stitches a better panorama. But again, results vary depending on what you shorten, how you shot. We have Pamela Weaver. That guy will set you back a 149150 US dollars. And then we have panorama studio. That guy is about 40 bucks, 3995 US dollars. So all of these software actually comes with free trials. You can go ahead and try. Any of these are pretty gooey. You can use pretty much with every single function. It'll just export with a watermark. So if you wanted to test it out and compare it with hugging or anything else, you can go ahead and do that on a trial basis. I so let's have a look at some free software options for merging your HDR. You can use something like a dark table, which is similar to Lightroom. There's also luminance HDR. I've had mixed results with luminance HDR, and that's why I've gone with dark table during this experimentation process. Another one that gets referenced quite a bit is picture naught. That is in Windows only for stitching panoramas, you have software like hugging. That one gets referenced by many users and it does have some tutorials and YouTube reviews and things on it, so you can check those out. I've had mixed results with that guy, but it might just be my operating system, but that's my experience thus far. You can also use auto stitch, which is a free version. It's very much for beginners though. It doesn't give you any control over rotating images. It doesn't merge to HDR hours, but it is a nice way to get started as well. So that's a look at some software options out there for you, both paid and free. And we've compared some pros and cons between the different workflows. You can go ahead and test this out for yourself. We're gonna do walk-throughs for both workflow so you can get a nice feel for whichever process you'd go with. And you can use any combination of these. If you already have Photoshop, you might do most of it in there. So whenever you have used that, but there are some free alternatives knowing that there will be some compromises. But hopefully that's laid out some facts and some research for you so they can help you make up your mind so you don't have to spend as much time as I had trying to solve this problem of doing everything in free software even though it is possible. So let's jump in and let's do some walk-throughs for both workflows. 15. Processing: Ingesting Data: Alright, so now that we're ready to start processing our panoramas, we're going to start from the beginning. We are going to have to ingest our footage. We're going to ingest our panoramas. So you can do it many ways, of course, as with anything, you can either do it manually by copying and pasting or dragging and dropping in your Finder. We can use software like Da Vinci Resolve, for instance, which is a free software, whichever process you choose to go with to ingest your data. The most important part is that you'd make sure you check your file sizes that if you have it took gig card, it matches your two gig on your hard drive or computer where it be offloaded. So whichever process you go with, the most important part is checking your file sizes. So let's jump in and let's do a walk-through. We have a card. We're going to offload it so we can either just create a new folder. So I've just gone into my folder structure. I usually like to add the date to 24 and just call it taste. The reason I like organizing by debt this just because it does the order everything sequentially, which is just kind of a nice thing to do. Alright, so the first thing we can do is I'm just going to create a card one just for example purposes. So the first thing we can do is obviously just drag and drop or copy and paste. Alright, so we can copy and paste, drag and drop. Same thing. The reason why I don't like this is because if your card reader gets knocked or anything happens to stop the transfer, it'll stop the entire transcript and have to start again. So it's not a very safe way of doing it. The other way we can use is we can open up Da Vinci Resolve, which is a free software and is very, very robust. It works on all operating systems. I'm just going to go create an untitled new project. We'll go into the Media tab bottom left here. Then you'll see the clone tool on the top-left corner. So you just hit that and this little window will appear. So you can do is you can add a job. And you'll see it's very simple, it's just source and destination. So I'm just going to grab my card and I'm just going to drag it into my source. And I'm just going to create a new folder. Oops, which haven't done. Alright, and you'll see it'll pop up there and you're just going to drag that guy there. Alright, so then you just gonna hit Close and it's going to run through there very quickly. And the nice thing about this that if something happens, you can just resume the transfer. It will also export a nice text file just to show every bit of information is actually transferred. You can also add multiple jobs, which is really, really nice. Obviously don't have to do this. But debenture is always nice clone tool to let that run. And that is done. So again, you can add multiple jobs and you can run multiple cards at once if you wanted to. So I'm just going to quit Vinci and we will see a cartoon is their card, one is our copy paste. So cartoon series, a few other things. That is just a checksum text file. And just make sure that actually everything is transferred over. Most importantly, whichever way you choose to transfer your information, always check the sizes serve on a Mac, it's Command Option I, and it will check the file sizes of how many folders you select. 3.41. And it also keeps the Info tab active. If I click on this guy, you will see that my path has changed. So you'll see it's under this path and it's 3.41. And if I click back to my card, you will see that it is the card. Alright, so 3.41 there and then you can click in-between card one, card two. See, that's all the same sizes. So whichever way you choose to transfer a key part is to make sure that your file sizes are actually transferred across properly and as a simple command or file size check. So now that we've ingested our panoramas, we're going to look at file management next. 16. Processing: File Management: Okay, So we've ingested our panoramas. Now we're gonna do some file management. If you shot things properly and you created folders per panorama in camera, this is going to be a lot easier to do. But regardless, it's still helps. Renaming your files, renaming your folders, and doing some clean up before we start processing. So let's go ahead and do a walk-through on some file management. If he shot things properly, it would be pretty straightforward. You'll have exactly one pan out per photo case. You've created it in camera. But let's say you haven't, you might want to just clear that up. And you might also want to rename your folder. So you can either go to do that in Finder and you can just enter your information there. You can also batch rename things within Finder. So if you select all those new right-click and you go rename them. You can go replace text, you can go add text. So you might go, I had texts there after the name and you can go underscore piano 11. You can see the preview of what we'll name it here. So you can go and rename that. So go ahead and do that and find it as a really nice job, actually renaming so you don't need particular software to do this. You can see it's just running through doing that doesn't do a bad job. But if you wanted to manage your files and it's a bit more complicated, you can use Bridge, which is a completely free software, runs on any operating system. Nice way to get to it is you can either navigate through your navigation here or you can just, if you ever want to navigate very quickly, you can just right-click, right-click on the folder you want to go. Once you hit the Option key will go from one as partners. Copy that and click up here and you can seal credit path, paste that in there, and it'll take it straight to your folder. If I wanted to. Let's say for instance, I showed multiple panoramas into a folder. This is really nice way, easy way to check my images. It also loads the raw files really quickly. So a nice way to display your images. You can sort by type and you can tell your rules and you can just view your J pink so it loads it rather quickly. And you can change the size of the thumbnails display ad. You can change the way it displays. So it is just a really nice way of actually seeing your panoramas. So let's have a look at this. If you hit Spacebar, it'll open up in a bigger preview. Alright, and if you wanted to bulk rename, hit Command a and you can just go batch rename. And then this just gives you a bit more information. Your exam probably be down here again so I could go. Oh, that's cool, cool. The other one pan I didn't mean Palo will start it there. And we'll just get rename. And it's really quite quick, which is nice. If I wanted to rename my top folders. To me, it's just a slope double-click on the folder that I can delete them. You'll see that it's actually going to change here. So what am I do within bridge? If I delete this, it'll delete it in my folder so it's a direct correlation. So that is how you can use branch and it's completely free software is really nice quick way to just view or images to organize them. Yeah, it's a lovely software. Alright, so now that we have our farm management done, we're going to look at merging or HDR as our next step. 17. Processing: Merge HDR Photos: Alright, so our next step is to merge our HDR images. We're gonna do a paid version of this workflow as well as a free version. I'm also going to just, for example, sake, show you a very simple single position bracketed image and how to merge that because it's the same principle if you're merging a single image or multiple images. So we're going to look at both versions because for our panoramas, of course we're going to have to batch merge multiple images. So let's go ahead and have a look at that. We'll look at merging your HDR individually, PTU. We will do this automatically for us, but I think it's worth checking how to do this individually if you had to do that as your process. So you can either do it in my dream or you can do it in Photoshop. So I'm just going to pop that into Lightroom. And for example, sake, I'm actually just going to use a photo that's easier to see. So I'm going to go into one of my other folders and I'm just going to grab my rule images. You can see that's a three bracketed HDR that I shot. I'm just going to import that. Important. I'm just going to rotate which command left bracket. I'm going to select all three of them so you can see are going to develop. You'll see, that's my lowest brackets. So our exterior is lovely and exposed and interiors completely underexposed. Our middle bracket is a blend of the two. And then our fast bracket, our exterior is essentially overexposed and completely clipped. And then we have the exposure of the interior. So we want to merge those three into HDR. So I'm going to Shift select all three. I'm just going to right-click and I'm just gonna go further merge to HDR. Okay, So it's gonna do its thing. Then. If I wanted to see ghosting, so I can just turn the ghost overlap on. And what's nice about this that there isn't really any ghosting. So because I shot this on a tripod, there was a movement in between the images. If they're worried, you'd see a little bit of ghosting. I'm just going to hit Merge. It is merging as you can see up here. And you'll see it pop up, down the bottom here. I will now color balance, color correct? Whatever you want here so you can see the amount of information left. So we'll bring the highlights down all the way so you can see how much information is in our highlights because we've merged it. For example, if I didn't shoot HDR and that is what I would be left with. You see that there's really all that information is being lost because of merge and I've showed a bracket, you'll see that we're retaining all that information is so much information you can push it all the way. Alright, so I'm gonna bring my highlights down somewhere there. I'm going to bring my shadows up. We have it. I can bring my whites just a little bit because it creates a nice little vignette almost. And then you can bring your blacks up if you wanted to, if you want to brighten it in here, you could. Because we shoot with a neutral color profile, you can just add a little bit of vibrance and saturation, just a snitch. Then I'd like to add to remove chromatic aberration and enable profile corrections and automatically picks up that I showed it on a Canon 35-millimeter. And then we would like to auto fix that guy. Then you can go ahead and edit this whichever way you want. You can go all sorts of funny presets if you like. It doesn't really matter, you can go nuts. But the great thing is that we have all this information. So that is what we'd looked like with it merged, but you can see so much information we've retained absolutely everything. So that's one way you can do it. Now. I am going to just open it up in Photoshop. But there'll be File Automate and it'll be merged HDR Pro. And so you can either browns files and if you just drag that in there, it should just pop it up automatically. It okay. Alright, so it is currently merging. You can see it's not quite done yet. I can see the spinning wheel that's doing it in the background is essentially alright, so it's created a nice composite of the three. You can see we can hit Remove ghost even though there really wouldn't be any on this. And it's a 16-bit. We can go 32-bit. 16-bit is fine. Then you can just go ahead and play around with these settings if you wanted to. I'm not really going to touch it. Like I said, I usually tend to use library. And then you just hit Okay. I'll just rotate that. So yeah, laundry is a little bit quicker and I like it the way it merges the HRs a bit better as well. So to merge to HDR hours in free software, we will be using dark table. So I'll grab the same image we just used in light green, grabbed the rose, and I'm just going to drag it into dark table. Alright, I'm going to select all three of them. I'm going to rotate left just so it's easier to see to merge them. It's that simple. You have all three images selected and you just go create HDR. And you'll see here on the left here, I'm going to rotate that and also gonna give it a five-star rating. And I'll show you why that's important once we do a batch merge of the HDR hours, you also see that it's displayed a bit dark. That's not a problem. We're going to fix that. So you're going to navigate over to the dark room tab. So this is the same editing principles you get in Lightroom, give or take. You can navigate using these terms up here. Let's just bump the exposure on this guy. Let's have a look at that. And the way you activate any of these, it's just you turn on or off. You can search for anything by typing in here. Anything with the word highlight. I can turn on this guy here, turn that guy on, and I can adjust my shadows, eliminate my shadows up. I can bring my highlights down, but not too much. You can see doesn't do such a good job in comparison to Lightroom, for instance, compression, you can compress it, listen more, color adjustment. You can mess around with any of these. So that's just a quick run through of how to merge change jars using free software. And that is dark table. And so once you're done there, you can just go back out here, orange dark table and experts on your left, you can just navigate to where you found your image. We saving it. I'll say that guy in there. And you can save it out as a tiff 816 or 32-bit. You can also save it as a JPEG. I will just substitute J peg for examples purposes and you just go export. You'll see the progress down here. I'm going here. And there it is. So this is the Lightroom one. This is the dark table one. So as you can see, I've said it a little bit more editing on these edges to make it look more distinct. But you can get the idea. You're still able to merge to HDR hours using free software in order to prepare my images for our stitching software that does not automatically merged HDR hours, we will use dark table to merge the hedge jars as well as rotate them in order to stitch using, for instance, auto stage or even hugging. Hugging does merge automatically, but it doesn't always do a very good job. Let's bring a piano in. We're going to use the exact same method we used for this image here. So let's go and bring in it's grabbed the one we did the walk through one I'm going to just sort by kind. So as you can see, it's uploading. It is worth noting that dark table will only merge to HDR for raw images. So if you want it to do a quick test and stitch or jpegs, this is not really going to work, so make sure that you input your raw images. So I'm going to group my positions together. And the reason why I do this, it's just so it's a little bit easier once I started emerging. What I'm doing is I'm shifts selecting my three brackets per position. I'm gonna go group. The reason or how you know it's been grouped is it forms. There's a yellow box around the three images. So you know, that's a group. So I'm gonna go ahead and just group all of my images. You don't have to do this. I've just found that it's a little bit easier for me to visualize and stay organized when merging now that it's all been grouped. So I'm going to Shift select all three and then create HDR. If you select one image and try and create HDR, and we'll try and create an HDR from that single image. Not all three, even though it's any group. The group is purely for ease of use. So Shift select all three images and go and create HDR. You will see it working. And so there it is, it's underexposed, that's not a problem. We will fix that later. I'm going to give it five stars just because it makes a little bit easier for me to find and sort later on. I'm also going to rotate it while I'm at it makes it easier for me to spot. I'm going to select those and I'm going to create HDR. You'll see it always kinda pop up in front of your group. If you are unsure which one is your HDR, if you hover over b dot DNG, head shadow DNG. Alright, so I'm gonna go through and create HDR is for all of this. Okay, so now that I've merged all my images, The reason why initially didn't rotate these brackets. It's just so when I have my HDR, I just rotated, it makes a little bit easier for me to identify which one are my merged HDR images. The reason why I gave it a fast five-star rating is also that I can go and sort by rating. And it will group all my images together, which is exactly what we want. So 22 those now we'll have to go through and just fix the exposure really quick. So navigate to the Data tab. And I'm just going to expose this guy all the way and I am going to bring the highlights down on. That just helps me a little bit more compression. I bring my highlights down. It's too much somewhere there and lift my shadows a bit. Here we go. If I just copy Command C or Control C, and I just go ahead and I select my HDR images, shift select all of them, and I just go Command V or Control V. Paste that exposure correction onto all of them, which is what we want. And you can go through and edit these individually. It is worth checking your images. You're going to select all the images. You can go back to light table and then you are just going to hit Export. You're going to change your settings. You can select where you want to save it, like just output destination. And then you can change it to 16 bit eight bit, 32 bit. I'm just going to go Joe pick eight bird for example sake. I'm just going to export. And it'll export 2222 selected images, which will then in turn be ready to be run through your panorama stitcher. So that is how you do a batch merge using free software like dark table, right? So now that we know how to merge to HDR images, we're going to have a look at stitching our panoramas. And we'll look at doing that in our paid version, which automatically batch merges are HDR as well as stitches it. And we're also going to look at our free version, which means you'll have to merge and rotate your hips, your images prior to import into our stitching software. And purely for efficiency sake and testing wise, I found this to yield better results using free software like hugging. You can go ahead and try this for yourself and see what results you get as well. So let's go ahead and look at stitching our panoramas. 18. Processing: Stitch Panorama: Alright, so we're getting into the really, really exciting stuff. We actually get to see your panoramas come to life and that is stitching them. So given whichever workflow you choose is going to look a little bit different, we're going to have to merge the HDRI separately, or we will do it all in one using our paid workflow. So let's go have a look. We're going to look at both of these versions. So let's jump right into it. So we are going to start with our paid workflow first and we're going to use PT gooey, use the panorama. We did the walkthrough on, I'm going to open PT gooey. And I'm only going to select the jpegs just to make it a bit quicker to stitch for examples purposes, but you will be stitching the raw images. I'm just going to go sort by list. And then if you sort by kind, you can shift, select all your J pigs are all your roars. And you'll see it's 66, we'll just drag it into P degree. Alright, so all our images, all our brackets have come in the landscape, which is exactly what we want. We don't want some images, portrait and some landscape. And that is why we turn the auto rotate off on your cameras. So you're going to rotate all of them into portrait mode. And then we're going to enable HDR. We're going to merge bracket at images to HDR and link positions because we shot on a tripod, you can hit Okay? And so PT GUI is now merging all my brackets into single HDR images. And it does a relatively good job of that as well. You will see the panorama editor here and currently all our images are stacked right on top of each other. You can check your image parameters and you'll see everything is at 0. So it is as simple as dragging your images in, rotating to the left, enabling your HDR, and then you will go Align images. And so PDQ is a very simple user interface. You just drag them in, rotate them, enable HDR image, a line. All right, so there's our panorama. It is done a auto alignment and you can see our images. So if I turn that off, we'll see 12345678910. So that is our formula. That's the way we shot it. So that is how simple it is to align a panorama or stitch panorama in PT GUI. You can change the way it displays. You can do tone mapping in here. You can change your compression. You can do quite a bit within PT Gui. So let's say for instance that your panorama didn't come in at, had an issue. We can fix that using a GUI and its image parameters. So if you go to image parameters, you will see that this is the way it's aligned. So let's take image, just this one, and that's just a stack of three, right? So expand that. So let's take image 15 for instance and lead. So our role is our rotation, our pitch is our tilt, so it's plus 30 is close enough. And then are your, is its position in our horizontal rotation. So let's say, for instance, this guy didn't come in, let's say it came in at minus 200. You will see that it created a gap there, right? So it's placed that image incorrectly, but let's pretend that your panoramic came in and there was an issue with it. It didn't align properly. So it's very, very easy to correct that MPT GUI. I can see that there's a couple of images stacked on top of each other. And so there's multiple ways I can fix this. So I know image 15 because my formula is meant to sit up here and it is right above image six. So one thing I can do is I can go to Image six. Here it is. And I can just copy that. Go back to 15 and paste it. And it's placed it up there. So that is a very simple way in which he can fix problems within PT gooey. Another really, really cool thing is R Batch Processor. Way we can do that is by creating templates. So given that I know my formula, I'm going to just clear everything out here. I'm just gonna go, Let's go. If you shift select everything, you just go 0. It's going to put everything on top of each other again, right? So if I were to create a template, the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to rotate my images. I'm shifts selecting gonna go minus 19, it's going to rotate them all. Then I'm going to start placing images as per our formula. So this is a 24 mill and we know that our first row is minus 13, then plus 30, and then we'll have our top and bottom 90 degrees. So my first row, I know is nine images, nine positions we rotated. This guy was minus 30. Again, you should select all of them and you just input it and you'll sit shifting our images. Our next nine will be plus 13th, such as 30. These two I know, are 90 up. These two I know, or minus 90. Alright, so now it's placed our rows, but what I need to do is actually place it. Horizontally. So our first position obviously is at 0. And then remember we rotated 40 degrees. So it's going to be 4081206200 to 4320. And as you can see, it is now placing my images per these parameters, which is our formula. While I'm doing this, this is also going to create app templates. So now I'll place my second row, so it's 040. And you'll see that image switch into place there AT 2302, 8320. Alright, so now I'll place my top 2. First 1 we shot at 0, and then we rotated 90 degrees. And then same with our bottom guy is 090. Essentially manually aligned my images per these parameters. What I can do is I can save this information as a template which we then use to batch stitch information. So it takes everything. So whatever you decide to do in terms of your tone mapping or any other settings, it'll save that sitting as the template. So let's just leave it for that for now. We can go to Create Panorama and I can change my size as well. So obviously if I just wanna do a quick stitch or bad batch stitch to check multiple images, I will change this to be a bit smaller. So let's make that 15 thousand. Because remember again, this is going to save all this information, absolutely everything about it. If you did masking in it, whatever it is, one thing you can now do to save this, again, your image parameters is you go to File and you go Save as Template. Alright? So you don't really have to change anything here. It's just going to save it in the default PT gooey template position. You can name it whatever you want, but I like to use it by using my dates. 24 mole. Alright, so save that. Okay, cool. So now I've saved those. So if for instance I create a new project and I say Don't Save. And let's say I bring all this and again, same images. I'm not going to rotate, I'm not going to enable HDR anything at all. You just going to go file and apply template. And we're going to use the one we created today, which is this guy here. As you can see, that is automatically merging the HDR and it's automatically placing the images per the coordinates we placed in the template. Which is really, really nice. And it helps you stitch a lot quicker than trying to auto align it. So once you've actually done that, you will still hit a light images and I'll just make a few minor adjustments where perhaps things are just perfect, whichever never really are, but it'll just make a few minor adjustments. Right? Then you'll just go Create Panorama. And again here and you can either, if you stitch your rules, you can export, you can export a JPEG. But let's say if you go to, if you can also change the information. So we can change it to 16 bits. I'm just going to leave this at 18 J peg again just for quick export. And you can choose where you want to export it. I'm just going to create a panorama. That is default, is to export it in the exact same folder where it found the images so that it stitch. And so if I go back into my original folder, there's our panorama. As a bonus, I'll show you how to batch stitched panoramas using PT gooey. And we'll do that using our template that we created for the 24 mil. If you had different templates for, let's say a 3550 melt process would be the same. So what you're gonna do is you are going to go into P2 gooey and you're gonna go tools, and you will go batch builder. You'll go detect panoramas. You can choose multiple of panoramas, put folder with a fixed number of images. And I'll choose that because I know that I have 66 images for my 24 miles and I can also change it to row if I wanted to, but I'll go JPEG and this, you can either browse directly to where you wanna go. And it'll look in that folder. We can copy it as a path name. Remember right-click hold option in a low copy as pathname. And you can just paste it in there. So what it's gonna do, it's gonna look in this top folder here at all the folders. And it's going to look for 66 jpegs within each of these folders and then detect the panoramas. So as you can see, that's running through and it's finding that panoramas which is lovely. It's also finding that stitch folder, which is up there. And obviously we don't want that, so you just click on that and you delete. So when you've done your file management, this is very easy to do. So it is picked up for panoramas, 66 images, each. Then you will go, you can either run it from a new indie project, but because we've created a template, we're going to use that. It's going to create a faster and more accurate stitch. So you will go and select the template that we created, which is this guy here. And you will also select, will run align images. Otherwise it will just take the template and it won't do any micro adjustments. So we will still select, will align images. You can choose to delete the project files after batching and you always select send a batch list to batch Stitcher. So let's go ahead and generate projects. Alright, so now it is running through, it is stitching all these panoramas. And so that is how you batch stitch many, many panoramas if you've done your sorting properly and you've created a template. So we'll let that run through and we'll see what it produces. Alright, so that guy is done, our batch stitcher is complete. So we got into my folders. You will see that it's stitched all my panoramas without me having to do very much at all. Which is lovely. Cool. So what I usually do is I just go ahead and I grabbed these panoramas and I placed them in this stitch folder here. So that is how you stitch panoramas using the batch Stitcher and PT Gui. So next we will look at the free workflow to stitch panorama is using free software and we'll look at a couple of applications. We will look at auto stitch first, open that guy up. There is a very, very simple user interface and it doesn't actually give you any options to merge to HDR, to rotate them, anything at all. You can change the quality and the size and that is about it. So you just open that guy up. Let's use a different example. So what I've done previously is I've gone through and I've merged all my brackets into single HDR images. So you would do that using dark table, whatever you have. And we'll just drag those guys in. Your let it run and do its thing. But that is done running. And there is a panorama using auto stitch. So it's very, very simple, very primitive, but it's a nice way to get started. So if we want a bit more editing capabilities, let's have a look at hugging. This is the way it opens in these simple interface. So we're gonna do is you're going to load your images in same way you would any other. Let's grab this example here. And again, I've gone ahead and rotate it and merged HDR images. So I'm just going to grab all those open. Alright, it's going to load that guy in. An all you'll do is hit a line and it'll do its thing. It is a bit slow, so I will cut and come back to you. Once that is done, Let's go hit preview. It displays a bit funny for some reason. Alright, so it didn't do such a great job with this guy. The bottom-right quite nicely, but not the top guy. And so we can fix that in a similar way that we do in PT GUI interface advanced. What we can do is we can group by position and you can see it's the same as our PT gooey. It is a little bit more time-consuming. So if you double-click on this first image, we know that your is 0 and our pitch is minus 30. So we can go through and just change these and place them manually as we did in PT gooey. So I'll go through and do that. The reason why I'm doing this as well, a, so that I can create a template similar to PT GUI, which will make your stitching process a lot easier as well. So let's go through and do that. And you can see that it's actually placing our images as well down here as I'm doing this. Next row we know is 0 and it's plus 30. In the last two, I know is 90 up at 00. 90. This guy we know is at 0 and as a minus 199090 minus 90. Okay, so we've gone ahead and placed our images according to our formula. And as you can see, it is much, much better job at aligning it. If we go through and Into the formula, the way you save a template is you just go save as, and let's save it in that same folder. And I'm just going to call it 24 mil Hugin, HDR. Alright. Alright, so now that we've placed it, it tends to work really nicely when you actually try and find some control points. This control point find pre aligned helps during this process once we've imported our template essentially. So you just go create control points. And then we'll run through and Craig control points. Given the current placement of these images, which is again our formula. We'll let that run. It does take a little bit. So when it's finding control points, it is just finding similar points in each overlapping image. Alright, so now that we've created control points, we can go ahead and hit the line again. So that's done a lining. If you wanted to change the way projects, we're going to make sure that it's 360 by one. But you can change it to a little planet, whatever you wanna do. But we'll leave that as a full three, sixty, three sixty by 118. You can go back to assistant and then just go create a panorama. And that'll be due a very simple way of doing it. I'll probably change this just for example sake. Or you can go into your advanced tab and you're going to Stitcher. And you can change your settings here, calculate tech that guy out. And then you can change your format. You can go to if you can go do peg, you can go stitch. I'm going, I'm going to save it in that same folder. I'll just leave it the same name as it is. Is now done stitching. And there it is, and it's not too awful. We can fix some of these mistakes just in Photoshop. If I wanted to align another set of images, I can use that same template we just created, which is this, this project here. So if I just go File, Save and I can either load my images like we did before or drag them in. So I'll just go and grab this exterior one we used previously. Drag those guys in. As you can see, it comes in kind of all over the place and it's gonna do an okay job at aligning. Let's have look at it. We'll do an auto align all to aligning. And as you can see, it is all wacky. So if I wanted to use that template we created, load the previous projects. So let's go into photos, will sort prepositions. You can see it's all over the place. If I change my interface to expert, I can go File applied template and I will navigate to that previous project. So make sure you save this one if you intend to use it as a template in future instances, save it in a place that's easy for you to find. I'll just hit Open and you'll see it automatically changed our positions and pre aligned it according to our template, which is again our formula. So that's also going to help you align a lot quicker. So you can then go ahead and create control points using the pre alignment. Great. Okay, So I can now just go to my Stitcher, trace that back to 360 to 80 will leave a sizes that is all they would just jam pack for this example. But again, you can export as tiff. Any kind of quality. You can export as PNG will just go J peg for this example. I'll go ahead and stitch that. Let that run stitching. There you go. So you can see it does a much better job when you pre align it. And then run these Stitcher. Hugin does have a little bit of a harder time I've noticed, which is totally fine. In that case, I would suggest just shooting a little bit safer. So this is a 24 meropenem are shot with the safe method and you'll see it loads all of them in. We have how many? 26 images and remember that's all merged. So this is a safer way of shooting a panorama and it gives us something like that. And it does a better job at auto aligning. But ultimately, if you want to auto align, I'd say go shoot the safe method, but otherwise you can shoot your quick 24 mil formula and just pre aligned them using the formula and the positions as we did here. And then just apply your template and stitch using that. If you want to look at HDR images, we can do that as well. So let's go into this same one here. And I'm just going to grab the jpegs real quick and drive those in. So hugging will automatically detect that there is bracketed images and it will ask you to link the positions. So that's great. We'll go link position. And I'll go through and attend to create stacks of images. And you can see that if I change this so my y'all to 0, my pitch is minus 30 because I know it's my first position. And then I also need to rotate this image, right? Because remember, I haven't done that yet. You can go through and change all these parameters for all images. And you can see I only edited the one but it's changed. All three said recognized that as a stack of images. Then you can go ahead and create a template for this. You won't be able to apply the same one we created before because it's a different amount of images. So that one work you'll have to create a new set of templates if you want to merge the HDR. But like I mentioned, I've found better results merging the HDR hours prior to bring it into Hugin. But hugging does have the option to merge to HDR hours. I've gotten mixed results using that, right? So that is a quick look at using what arrested and hugging and different ways in which you can stick your panoramas using free software. Alright, so you high dynamic range 360 panorama is stitched and we'll just a couple of steps away from it being ready for application. The next step we're gonna be doing is to tone map and color, correct. 19. Processing: Tone Mapping: Alright, so our next step is to tone map and color, correct? And we'll look at doing it both in paid and free software. Okay, so we're going to look at are paid workflow first in order to color correct and tone map our panoramas, we will be using Lightroom for this. We'll open that guy up. Okay, great, So it's loaded a panorama I used previously. So the simplest way to do this, if you have a color chart in your shot is to zoom in, take your white balance picker and just select your white square. If you hover over this middle square here, that should represent 50% gray, which means it's bouncing back 50 per cent of the light. And if you look at our top right corner at our histogram, you will see the values that RGB values change as I hover over it. And that's about 50 per cent there, which is lovely. If you don't have a color chart in your shot, you will use something like a wall to try and find a wide balance or they'll have to improvise. Alright, so for tone mapping, that is simply a manipulation of our highlights are midtones and shadows. We can bring our highlights down because we have a lovely merged HDR panorama. We can bring our shadows up. We can bring my whites up a little bit. We can bring our general exposure up if we wanted to bring up blacks down. And then because we showed neutral, we can just add a touch of saturation. I would consider a very neutral edited HDR panorama. But you of course can add any pro for you'd like. You can make it as cool and as funky as you'd like with whatever presets you might have. So I would probably use that as it is. So that is a before and an after. So you can be a bit more specific when having a color chart in your shot to using the x-ray color checker plug-in. It is a little bit beyond this course. But know that you certainly can get a lot more specific when you have a color chart in your panorama, you can create specific color profiles per lens, per lighting scenario. We weren't covered in this course, like I said, a little bit beyond the scope. So let's look at a different example. Let's look at something a little bit more extreme. Let's load this guy here. And this will definitely need some color correcting and some color balancing. So as you can see, this is a nighttime shot on panoramas. I'm going to zoom in there. I'm going to use my color picker and I'm going to select that. And lovely that has created are white. So our middle gray is a little bit underexposed or not reflecting gray. So I'll go to the second square root cross, and then that's a little bit more accurate. Okay, so this guy here, I'm going to bring the general exposure up a smudge. I'm gonna bring my highlights down quite a bit and bring my shadows up. And I can even lift the blacks if I wanted to a little bit and again little bit of saturation. And so that is a before and that is an after. So that is why it's important too. Color correct and tone map your images that are free software. We will be using GIMP. You can use dark table like we did previously, but I'll use games. But just because our next step of removing our tripod will be done in GIMP as well, which just makes it your workflow a little bit quicker doing both at once. So use that guy, just drag it in. Gimp is pretty straightforward. You just kept your colors tab. And then you've got all these options out here. So we can start with our white balance, color, temperature, and you can adjust this. Let's put a split view one so you can see on the left adjusting the color. So this guy is not far from wrong, like a little bit cooler. Here we go. Then you can do our brightness and contrast. So we can bring the brightness up a little bit. There. Then we will bring our shadows and highlights. Remember that is how we do tone mapping is manipulating our shadows and highlights. Let's bring those shadows up a little bit. It's a bit slow to render, so you'll see the changes happening there. Let's bring our highlights down. The brand shows up a little bit more, not too much. We can compress our image a little bit. Here we go. We can do saturation. A little bit there. Alright, so that's again a very basic way of tone mapping and color correcting using GIMP, you can use dark table, but like I mentioned, our next step, which is removing the tripod will be done in Gibbs. So it's very simple to just come in here, color correct and tone map using game, and then move the tripod. You can also go in here and has a tone mapping feature. We can try some of these. I found the Reinhard one kinda yielding the best result. It does an automatic tone mapping. I still prefer doing it manually, but you can certainly go ahead and do that. So this one's a bit bright. What does bring their brightness down to somewhere where you live or hit. Okay, so that is how you tone map and color, correct, using free software. Alright, so your panorama should be looking fantastic at this point. We just have one more thing to do before it's ready for application. And that is to remove the tripod and color chart if it's in your shot. So that's what's up next. 20. Processing: Removing Tripod: Okay, so the final step is to remove the tripod and the color chart in order to prepare it for application. And as always, we're going to look at both paid and free software. From there we will export it and it'll be ready to go. So we've opened the stitch panorama that we've edited in Lightroom and toe mapped and we've opened it in Photoshop. So in order to remove the tripod, I am going to duplicate this layer Command J is the shortcut. I'm going to go into Image, Image Rotation a 180. The reason we do this is once we go and filter and distort our polar coordinates, he'd always does it from the top for some reason, rectangular to polar. We'll want that selected and hit. Okay? And you'll see it's distorted our entire panel, so we're looking straight down onto the panel. I'm just going to zoom in there. And so there's a couple of ways you can do this. You can hit your lasso tool and that's just the owl short key. And you can just drag around your object. And this is definitely the very quick and dirty method. Because I'm on a patterned surface, it's probably not going to do great job, but let's have a look. So I'm going to select that and I'm going to hit Shift, Delete or Backspace. And you make sure that content aware is on and I'll hit Okay. Do an awful job. I'm not going to worry too much about it because I'll show you some other examples how to paint it up properly. So let's do the same with this guy. Shift Delete, Content-Aware, not bad at all. Command D to get rid of the running ads, or I'm going to zoom out. And you see it's really not that bad. And you'll see once we flip it back, you won't even notice. So they'll Filter, Distort polar coordinates and we'll flip it. So I'll go from polar to rectangular. You'll see it's still upside down. So we'll just go to Image, Image Rotation 180 and the go. So that is a version of our piano with the troponin at tripod and sharp painted out, in, out. And it's really that simple when using Photoshop. And we'll just go ahead and save that out either as a tiff, no tripod. We can save it out as a JPEG, whatever you might prefer. Save that for when you save it as a JPEG and you can go ahead and change your size. It's 2.75 megawatts. You can change your quality to very high. You will see that changes our file size. Go to maximum 12 megabytes. Go ahead and save that. And make sure we save that way we want. And that is how simple it is. Okay, so here's another example of a pan out and just use the clone brush in Photoshop. So I've already rotated my images and maps it to polar coordinates. Instead of using the Lasso tool like we did previously, we're going to use the clone tool. You're going to hit option to select your source. You are just going to start painting out your tripod. So that is how to use your pen tool in Photoshop to remove the tripod. Then another example. So this is going to be quite difficult because we have to paint out not only that tripod on a very distinct pattern, we also have to paint up to shadows because there's so much light in the scene. So you're gonna do the exact same thing. You can use your clone tool. And you are going to start with my fine brush a bit smaller. I'm a zoom right in. So I'm going to select my sources. You do. It's more actually. And you are going to start painting out your tripod. You're going to find a source that looks something similar to where you wanna go. And you are going to just paint this out so that you can see, I'm just going to take us quite awhile, so check back with me once I've completed this. All right. So that is before we've painted out the entire tripod to shadows and the Nichols chart as well. And it was quite painful. Whenever you have places like the it's trying to find perhaps a piece of ground that's more uniform or easier to paint out. And they obviously, because we had so much light, we had two shadows as well, so we had to paint that out. So it's always something to be aware of. But that is how you paint out a tripod and color chart in Photoshop. So I'm just gonna go ahead and save that out to remove the tripod and colored chart in free software, I've just opened up that exact same panorama. In GIMP, GIMP is a free software and we're gonna do the exact same process. I'm going to duplicate my layer and I'm going to go image transform, rotate a 180 degrees and it will rotate it upside down. And then we're going to go filters, distorts polar coordinates. And that'll map. So I've just export this image as a JPEG. Just solid, goes a bit quicker, a bit slow in. Alright, so you just wanted to map from top. That's why we flipped it upside down and to polar we'll hit Okay, we aren't going to zoom in. I'll go to 100%. It's less than two, isn't as nice or I'm not aware of it being. So we're just going to clone, brush it out. So is this clone tool up here, which exact same way as you would do in Photoshop. So you are going to just hit Command or Control to select your source. So wherever you click it, That's what we'll source from. The exact same thing in Photoshop. So you just going to collect your source. I've also, if you've noticed, selected a hard edge. I want to sample as close to my object and I'm trying to paint out. It's not as obvious, so I'll just keep changing my source quite frequently. Also not to create a pattern that's two recognizable. But again, as you saw in a previous example, you won't really know. So now it looks quite obvious when you look at it this way, but once you flip it back, you won't really notice as much. And you can go in and do a much better job than I'm doing here. But again, this is for explanation sake. Let's do color chart. Right? So we're just gonna do the exact same thing again, we are just going to zoom out. You can see that's gone. We'll go filters. And I can just go back up here to polar coordinates or you can go back to distorts polar coordinates. And we'll just do the reverse. So we'll go unselect to polar. And you'll see that it is rendering. So that guy, once that's done, you'll hit Okay. And now we just need to flip them and show the image transform. I did a 180 degrees while the ego. Same thing done in free software. So you can just say that guy out. Congratulations, you should have a beautiful high dynamic range, 360 panorama, ready for the real world. And that is what we're going to look at next. How do we apply? How do we use these panoramas? Let's dig in. 21. Application: Okay, So this is a really exciting part of the process, and that is how we actually apply and use these panoramas in the real-world. We're going to look at some VFX specific examples like image-based lighting, how you might use it in conjunction with photogrammetry in lidar to texture environments and light environments. We're going to look at how you might use it in virtual reality. How in real estate you could use it for virtual tours. We're also going to look at some online resources where you can upload panoramas doing you might even make a little bit of extra money from it. You can also upload it to Google Street View, which is really quite cool. If you're a nerd like me, you might just shoot them to show your family. I've personally done this many, many times where I've just shot 360 panorama because I really just wanted to share where I was with my friends and family when I got back home using an app like spherical eyes for instance. So let's dig in and look at some of these examples, which is really quite exciting. Alright, firstly, let's look at some of the effects, image-based lighting in the very simplest way possible. So I've just opened up blender, which is free software, but you can do it in any 3D software. And I've just created a simple sphere or a reflective silver bowl. And I've loaded my panorama. So this is a very simple way of doing image-based lighting. I have my object in my scene, and then I light it using my photographs. So as you can see, as I move around the environment, my object, my 3D object, is reflecting my environment. And so that is how you would light a 3D scene. And we do this in conjunction with the chromium silver balls, unsaid. But those are very, very simple way of doing image-based lighting. So let's have a look at just a couple of other examples. Because why not? Here we go. So we have a different scene and this is a very bright sunny, so you can see the sun's up there. And our 3D object is reflecting our environment. It is being lit by our high dynamic range 360 panorama. Zoom up and down. I can wrote it up or down and it will reflect 360 degrees. Let's load perhaps a nighttime. Here we go again. And as you can see, it is reflecting our environment. Really quite cool. So if I go over here where she sees, should see a little bit read from that tree up there, which is really quite cool. This one is a cool one to look at. This scene has this circular lighting right at the top and you can see that's being reflected in my object is awesome as well as these really distinct lights that's all being reflected. Object is being lit by the image. And that is a very simple explanation of image-based lighting and why it gets used in the VFX world. So I'll just open up a bit more of a complex 3D object here. We'll just go to different shading port. Alright, so here's a little bit more of a complex object, if you will, or 3D object. And you can see it is still reflecting my environment, which means it is being lit by my environment. And this is a very rudimentary way of viewing it, but it's a good way of just showing the example of what image-based lighting is. There we go. So you can see this guy is being led by our image, which is really quite cool. In this is just a quick render of it as well, just so you can compare. That is image-based lighting for you. Let's have a look at some other examples. You can also use high dynamic range 360 panoramas to texture a 3D object really quickly. So if you have a set or an environment or an object that's been lidar scanner or created using photogrammetry, you can align that really quickly to the geometry and do a quick texture of your object as well. So image-based lighting is actually quite important in the gaming industry as well. They use HDR, high dynamic range panoramas to light. They're seeing their environment to build environments, and particularly making it more photo-realistic. And then the same goes for virtual reality games for that matter as well. All virtual reality as a general image-based lighting is very, very beneficial and used in those industries as well. For real estate, you can use software or an application like cooler. There are plenty of them out there, which lets you create 3D virtual tours or 360 virtual tours of real estate, but you can really apply it to anything. So if we just go to my tours, let's have a look at one that I created earlier and this one was just. Outside at the marina which are used as a fly through. And you can just go ahead and create virtual tours, fly through the environment, tours, whatever you want. So that is another really cool way in which you can use 360 degree panoramas and HDR panorama, which is particularly helpful when shooting real estate because you often have a blown out window outside and then a darker environment insights or HDR photography is fantastic for that. There are plenty of online resources that you can use where you can upload you 360 HDR panoramas. This one is 360 cities. It's really quite cool. Here's a nice little viewer as well. You can watch in VR, you can change the way a display so we can do this in little planet. The cool thing about this slide is that it actually links it to Google Street View as well. So if you go into, let's go account English. So here is a panorama that I shot and that I've uploaded to 360 cities. And as you can see, it's being selected so as automatically linked to Google Earth or Google Street View, which is really quite cool. There's a really cool viewer, this guy. So let's jump in. So this one you would have seen plenty of times during the course. This is one I shot actually while just on holiday and I wanted to show my family around. So I shot this guy. But it is now in 360 cities. And people can use this and you can earn a commission from it, which is really quite cool. And like I said, it also links it to Google Maps, Google Street View. You can also upload your HDR 360 panoramas to either online resources like turbo squid for instance, or poly haven. And you can contribute, you can add your hydrogen. Ours here, we can search for, Let's go HDRI. So this is just a resource of hatred your eyes 3D models, panoramas that you can upload a turbo squid and then cell we can choose to contribute it for free as well. So you can go into turbo squid. They have lots of affiliate websites that they are linked with, Including Photoshop, plugins and all sorts of fun things. So that's something that you could do. Poly haven, for instance, is another one and wonderful resource full of lots of lots of textures and hedge DRIs. They are very specific with their upload requests. If you go to contribute, Let's go down to requirements for how your eyes. So it needs to be photo-based. It needs to be for linear, no tone mapping, color contrast, so no editing in that sense. So Fully Raw needs to be unclicked, it needs to be high dynamic range, and it needs to be a minimum of 16 K resolution. So as you can see, this is another example why it is important that we should really high-quality 360 panoramas and why we tend to use different Lin sizes as well. Because that helps us build really high resolution panoramas and want them to be high-quality as well. So as you can see, they want the tripod removed, all those sorts of things that we walked through. Poly haven. There is no payment, but it's certainly a very cool way for you to have your work out there if you so choose. And there are plenty of other similar resources as well. Those are just a few examples. So let's have a look at Google Earth and Google Street View. Let's go to Google Earth and look at Chatsworth House. Take us right there. Very cool. And then I don't think my panel will be live yet because I've actually just uploaded it. So if you drag your little Street View man, you'll see these blue dots appear and that is positions that people shop at panoramas add once mine is actually loaded. It will also appear here. So you can, let's drop in there. Cool. So this is one somebody else sharp. But as you can see, that's a really cool way of using the panorama. So you can do the exact same thing with Google Maps, of course. And you'll see once we drag that little man again, you'll see those exact same dots appear. Let's get a different position. Now let's go to Time Square. And that's really all these panoramas are, right. So Google has little truck that does it. But then people also go and upload their three-sixths panoramas. And you can go anywhere in the world and you cannot be, of course linked these guys. And they get used on Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Street View, which is really quite cool. So you can upload it to Google, you can upload it to 3D resources. We can earn a little bit of extra cheering. For instance, people can go in here and by this and use it for their learning. And then there's a few other resources as well. So that's really quite cool as well. So as you can see, there are so many ways how you can use high dynamic range 360 panoramas. And I think the list is just going to keep expanding. And before we finish this course, I'm gonna give you some bonus tips and tricks. I'm going to tell you what resources are available to you through this course. And additionally beyond this course. And we're also going to answer some frequently asked questions. So stick around. 22. Maintenance: So as this course draws to a close, I wanted to give you some bonus tips and tricks and tell you what resources are available to you through this course that will help you beyond this course. I think the first bonus tip, and it's something that was taught to me and as always, stuck with me, is to tell a story with your photography. And I don't think it matters what type of photography you do it. It might be portrait or landscape, or virtual reality. Tell a story with your photography because it's still a creative pursuit, even though this is a more technical process of doing, it is still storytelling. So that's something to always keep in mind. Move in a certain way that you're not shooting a panorama here than they are, than their move in a way that makes sense. A second bonus tip is to be patient with your photography. Wait for people to move out of your shot. They, in most cases, well before taking it. If you're shooting on a day where it's both cloudy and sunny, shoot just cloud or shoot just sun, so everything matches really nicely. So tell a story with your photography and be patient as well. Pick your time, pick your moments. Sometimes it can have to move really quickly to capture the cloud cover that you have at that time. But keep those things in mind. I think it'll really elevate your game. Then probably the most important tip I could ever give you is to go out and shoot. There is nothing like learning by trial and error. Take your gear, go out and shoot, find your nodal points, find the shooting angles, two different methodologies processed differently that will truly elevate the way you should and then your results in the end as well. And have fun with it because that's what it's all about. This is a creative pursuit. And at the end of the day, whatever application you use it for, there's an element of fun and we're so incredibly blessed that we get to do this. So go out and have fun with that. I'm also going to let you know what resources are available to you through this course, this entire course, a PDF version that you can download and reference really quickly if you ever wanted to refresh on a particular area of the course. There's also a PDF of the shooting and your formulas. So you can reference that really quickly. And then a PDF of what your recommendations are, the software we spoke about. So it's just really easy for you to access. And then I'm also going to add some additional resources and other articles and videos to watch that might help you as well. So speaking of that, I'm going to try and answer some of your frequently asked questions next. 23. Frequently Asked Questions: Okay, So here are some questions that are often get asked when teaching this course in person. One of them being, how do you shoot in low light? So we apply, of course, the same principles, but given our lighting scenarios, you're going to have to make some adjustments. If you're working on set, you might be pushed for time and oftentimes you are, so you're going to have to compromise on some things and we'll talk about that next because that's also something I get asked quite frequently. To shoot in low light. You're going to want a lower F-stop so that you don't have shutters that are too long. And we don't want to push our ISO to hide to introduce noise as well. So this ties in with that compromise as well. So perhaps I'll cover them at the same time. So the next question being, what can I compromise on? So let's use a dark night time. As an example. You want to f-stop of no lower as 5.6 because it'll be too shallow. You're still going to sit, you're hyper-focused as we know. And the ISO, depending on your camera, you're going to find the point where you start introducing noise and not go above it. So for my camera it's 640. And then you're going to adjust with your shutter speed again, these are basic exposure principles. Bacon Now see how crucial they are in producing quality work. And so that's why it's important. We understand that from the beginning. So you will never want to push your ISO too high and you never want to go too low on your F stop because it'll be too shallow. And so your shutter speed will be your playing range if you go too low and your shutter speed, you might be there a significantly long time. So things to consider here is rather underexpose. Overexpose particularly if you have a scene with, for instance, a nighttime scene and its exterior, some very bright lights as well. So you still need to expose for both of those sources and they've completely on the opposite side of the spectrum or histogram. So if you're in doubt, rather underexposed, overexposed, you're more likely to pull information out of the blacks or shadows then from clipped highlights because there is nothing there. Once it's clicked in the highlights, there's no information. So when in doubt, rather underexposed, a little bit overexposed. And that goes the same for any daytime or any high contrast scenarios if in doubt underexpose by a stock. It also will make your work a little bit quicker if that is your default setting is to rather underexposed, overexposed. So what do you compromise on if you're in a scenario it's very dark, you have no time. What do you compromise on? I would probably bring down my f-stop first. Especially if you're in a large environment and you far from objects, I would bring my f-stop down first. If you're shooting in, for instance, a very narrow hallway, you might need to reconsider that and you would have to bump your ISO. I would start with those guys. Your shutter speed will be your last one that you compromise on. Again, that is completely time-dependent. You'd still in some scenarios, would rather capture a panorama than nothing at all because you ran out of time. So you're gonna have to, again, I think that ties into practice. Just go out and practice and practice under different circumstances and that'll really help you out with that. But I feel that clarifies least some confusion as to what you can compromise on. Another one I often get is how to fix a panorama that doesn't stitch automatically or properly. If you shot in a certain way, if you shot in accordance to a formula, regardless if it's one you've calculated or one I've given you. If you know that formula, you will know how to fix it. You can go into software in both Hugin, MPT, gooey, even though it's a little bit easier. And Peter GUI, you can go in like I've showed it in creating the template. You can tell that software where to place that specific image that will really help you out. And that's where the formula is really important. It's the easiest way to fix a panorama that's not stitching properly and it happens. Stitching software often don't like the sky plane or floor plane because it's hard to align with anything else if page, especially if you have just a bright open sky and nothing else and no trees or nothing to align it to. So telling your software manually, mathematically where there's image are meant to be really help you out. And then this is probably more a VFX specific question, but I do get asked, where do the three-sixths panoramas fit in the VFX texture photography workflow. In the film industry, we use it in conjunction with our texture photography. So we usually texture in flatlined depends on the supervisor and the show. But we tend to texture and flat lighting so we don't bake in any harsh shadows or contours so they can paint it all in afterwards. And then we should add panoramas in the hero lighting and that is what they use to then like the textures and enlight the environment as well. So it works in conjunction with a texture photography. The texture photography part is related, but also completely different subject that if interested, I can always do course on later in life. So hopefully that's answered some of your questions. But if there's anything specific, please get in contact anytime and I'll try my best to answer them for you. There's also plenty of other resources out there that will help you as well. I think ultimately going out there and shooting is probably going to be your best bet. You're probably going to answer a lot of these questions for yourself. And you're going to remember it. Before we part ways. We're gonna do a quick wrap up of the course. 24. Conclusion: [MUSIC] Here we are. We've reached the end of the course. I wanted to do summary of the entire course just as a refresher because we really did cover a lot. We started with some basic myths and we've proved that you don't need expensive equipment or expensive software to shoot high-quality, high dynamic range, 360 panoramas. We've also covered some core principles. Basic exposure photography principles. What high dynamic range photography is, what 360 panoramic photography is. How we use all that knowledge to create high-quality panoramas. We covered what gear you'd need and you can use anything you really have. The key element is a panoramic hit and there are multiple options out there. But that is what really set you apart from shooting sharp, crisp images. Then we covered how to find your formula. You're shooting angle for your body and your lens combination. We looked at doing that both using online calculators or the formulas I've given you that gets used in Hollywood every day. From there, we looked at our nodal point. What is our nodal point? Or I know parallax point? The importance in shooting panoramas that aligned but are crisp as well. We did a walkthrough on how to do that. As you'll remember to find your body nodal point, you pointed down and you align it to the center of your head. Then for our lens, we move it back and forward and try and align the two objects by doing that. Just a quick run through of how to find your nodal point. Remember to always write it down, have them handy and do all of this preparation prior to going shooting. It's going to make all the difference. Preparation is absolute key to high-quality end result. From there, we did a shooting hands-on walk through. How do we take everything we've learned up to this point and apply it in a real-world situation. We consider our exposure principles. We take our formula and we've set up our camera according to our nodal markings. Then we shoot a panorama and we've touched on some key things like always leveling your tripod, how to set your hyperfocal, and the importance of that to shoot in a formulaic manner to make processing easier and to keep you on track when shooting. We also covered creating folders per panorama in camera, which makes processing so much easier. Then of course, we walked through the entire processing workflow from ingesting your data to merging your HDR, to stitching, tone mapping, removing the tripod all the way through to exporting for application. At application, we've seen there are so many ways in which you can use these panoramas, which is very exciting. Then like I said, I think it will only keep growing. Then we covered just a few additional questions that might not be specific to this course, but I get asked quite a lot and hopefully that's given you just a little bit more extra information into the bonus tips and tricks like tell a story with your photography, be patient and practice. Then you now know what resources are available to you additionally as well, and quick access forms. Then ultimately go out and shoot, take this knowledge, take action and implement shoot go, trial and error. Go make some mistakes, go learn, because that's where the fun lies. That's where this knowledge actually sinks in, is if you'd go out and take some action. I really hope you got a tremendous amount of value from this course. I've had such a joy presenting this to you. I hope you're able to take what you've learned, walk away right now and go shoot some high-quality 360 HDR panoramas. Thank you once again and have fun. [MUSIC]