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.