Reference links

Making 360º panoramic photographs can be a little complex. You can hire someone to do it for you (me for example ) or you can learn how to do it yourself. When learning you will see that it is possible to spend some hours until you reach a desirable result. An initial stitching can be fast if you shoot well. I am able to make one during a one hour speech, besides explaining the subject and highlighting the main tips and tricks of the workflow, but you might expect to spend around 3 hours to make all the final adjustments and publish the job. And this is the time it will take when you have a very good experience with it.

I always try to share what I know and my way of doing those pictures, but my main efforts are to produce Portuguese documentation, as there is already very much material in English, but sometimes I take the time to translate my things. Here I list English references, mine and many others that helped me to learn.

Things I have made

Sorry, there are few in English. I usually do more importance to produce things in Portuguese, as there are already plenty more in English.

• Article at the BSD Magazine Jan/2013 (PDF starting on page 26)
• How to cover the nadir with the clone tool
• My short recipe for making the pictures with the DJI Phantom quadcopter
• Finding the No Parallax Point with a paper, tape and clip

Tutorials

• Very good and big wiki about panoramas
• John Houghton page: lots of tutorials, references, etc
• Tilman Bremer tutorials on hardware DIY, shooting, stitching, etc
• Understanding perspective and parallax problems
• Lens Calibration on Hugin
• Blend masks on Hugin
• Mending parallax errors on GIMP with shear tool
• Creating 360 enfused panorama with Hugin
• Many tutorials for the whole process
• Another series of tutorials for the whole process
• How To at Panoguide site – a series of how to guides
• Many guides at Philohome site
• Optimal Stitching Position
• HDR and Linux
• Video on how to use a virtual tripod to shoot handheld
• Tutorial on how to make and use a virtual tripod (philopod)
• IVRPA references page

Tools sites (some with lots of documentation)

• Very good and big wiki about panoramas
• Enblend and Enfuse – tools to merge pictures
• Hugin – the initial stitching tool I use for mounting panoramas
• Panotools Scripts – scripts that help some of the process steps
• GIMP – free image editor I use to do what people usually say its done by “Photoshop”
• Deval VR player – I use it to see the panoramas on Windows during the process
• Panini – one more viewer. It’s the one I use on Unix (FreeBSD)
• FSP Viewer – one more viewer for Windows. Claims that works with wine on *nix.
• Salado Player – flash plugin that I use to post panoramas on internet
• VR5 pano viewer – model/template/plugin I use to post for iPhone and iPad based on HTML5
• Panorama player comparison – reference to compare many web players
• PanoVisu – an HTML5 free publisher. Has an user friend GUI made in Java
• SamyangFisheyeDefisher – script to remove fisheye distortion from pictures

Commercial tools that I would recommend

• Affinity Photo – an image editor capable of editing 360° images in equirrectangular format
• PTGui – stitching tool, can also publish a single panoramic image (not a tour)
• Autopano – stitching tool
• Panotour – publishing tool for single panoramas or virtual tours. It is the GUI for krpano
• Pano2VR – publishing tool for single panoramas or virtual tours
• krpano – publishing tool for single panoramas or virtual tours – This is the one I use, as I don’t care for a GUI. It has been discontinued in 2019.

Gadgets and related things

• Professional tripod heads and some home made
• Proposal for the most simple DIY panoramic tripod head (PT_BR)
• My own DIY tripod head
  • First version
  • Second version
  • Third version
  • After the third I made some prototypes until reach a 7th more complex model, then did some improvements on it, reaching what I called the version version #7.1
• Gigapan Pro – equipment that automates shooting to make gigapixel images (there may be others listed at the first link shown here, like the Rodeon)

Forums to exchange knowledge and learn a lot

They are a very good place to get in touch with specialists and exchange ideas, post your jobs and learn a lot.

• Pano Fórum – first forum in Poutuguese dedicated to to panoramic photography
• Panophoto – French forum that inspired me to create the Pano Fórum
• Panoguide – Forum kept by the Tour Wrist team
• Kolor Forum – Forum kept by the manufacturer of the Autopano/Panotour software
• IVRRPA – International VR association that also keeps a forum

Galleries that inspire us

• Airpano.net – non-profit groups of Russian photographers that want to make aerial 360 panoramas from the most interesting places in the world
• Ayrton 360 – 360 pictures Brazilian photographer
• XYZ 360 – Brazilian panoramic and 3D pictures agency

• French:
  • PhotoJPL – Photographer
  • Robert le Sac – Photographer
  • France Panorama – Agency
  • Xavier Spertini – Photographer
  • Agence 360 – Agency

Galleries where you can publish your pics

• 360 Cities – International 360º pictures community with images from all the world
• View AT – web platform in spirit collaborative that allows the generation and dissemination of panoramic photographs
• TourWrist – Gallery of pics published by community, mainly focused on its iOS app and pro kits to make panos, but also accepts any image.