If you've ever thought about making virtual tours and own
an Insta360 camera you're probably wondering which is the best workflow,
which shooting settings should you use and how should you stitch and edit your shots
for maximum quality? In this video I'll take you behind the scenes as I make a
professional virtual tour with the Insta360 One RS 1-inch 360 and reveal all of my best tips for
shooting and editing 360 photos to achieve the best results with any Insta360 camera.
Big thanks goes out to Insta360 for sponsoring this video, however as always all opinions within
the video are 100% my own. Now let's shoot. If you're shooting an interior which most virtual
tours are, putting on the house lights will help light up darker areas of your location. So do that
if you feel it will help. If there's any outdoor areas you want to feature then be sure to make a
clear pathway between indoors and outdoors so you can connect them easily later. Finally do a quick
walkthrough of your location and do a 360 with your own eyes before shooting to see if anything
needs to be tidied or hidden from shot. If all is clear it's time to get out our gear. And you
don't need a lot of gear to shoot virtual tours. The main ones being your 360 camera,
here I'm using the One RS 1-inch and a monopod. Here I'm using the brand new Bushman Monopod Pro
these aren't the cheapest options out there but they are two high quality pieces of gear if you've
got a budget of around a thousand dollars. You can definitely use a cheaper camera and monopod
if you prefer to keep costs down. Now once you've assembled the monopod and attached your camera
you'll want to double check that it's perfectly straight and level. Next it's a good idea to clean
the lens with the lens cloth that came for free with the camera, because who wants smudges in
their shots? Now that the setup is done, yeah that was easy, it's time to choose the best
shooting settings and there are two ways to change your settings. The first one being on the camera
however I find with the 1-inch that the screen is a bit too small which is why instead I connect to
the camera through my phone to take advantage of the much bigger phone screen. This will make
changing your settings and activating your shots so much quicker. So which shooting settings should
you use? Well the first place to start and this is something that is unique only to Insta360 cameras
is PureShot mode. They released PureShot mode around two years ago and this essentially enhances
the dynamic range of photos through taking multiple shots and combining them into one,
while also reducing noise and preserving detail resulting in a much more vibrant image. So if you
own the X3 or One X2 you'll want to use PureShot mode as well as with the One R and One RS. The
1-inch has PureShot mode as well however it does one up all the other Insta360 cameras
in an even better PureShot mode which is called PureShot HDR and what this does is it takes the
PureShot that we were shooting before but this time it auto brackets the shots, meaning you can
shoot anywhere from three to nine PureShot photos and have them combined into one ultra High Dynamic
Range photo and right now the 1-inch is the only camera that has this feature. To activate it
instead of onto our regular shooting mode we're going to go into HDR photo mode and up the top
make sure PureShot is selected. Next we can change a couple of things, AEB which refers to the amount
of photos we'll take and EV which refers to the amount of stops apart each of those photos
are. So you could choose five shots two stops apart or you could choose nine shots one stop
apart and this is the setting I would recommend choosing because it's taking more overall shots
and they're closer in range which means you're capturing more of the overall dynamic range than
shots that are way darker or way lighter than the other shots. Once your camera is set up in HDR
PureShot mode with nine shots or one stop apart it should stay like that for your entire shoot,
so you only have to set it once and you're good to go. So this is by far the best shooting workflow
for the 1-inch or X3, One X2, One RS and One R it's choosing single shot PureShot mode and
for any of the older Insta360 cameras pre One R, the best shooting mode is going to be using
in build HDR. Before you start shooting you'll want to set your white balance manually to avoid
shots looking too yellow or too blue going from room to room because lighting conditions within
a big location can change significantly so set your white balance by eye to what you think is
the right balance of warm to cool. For this hotel room it seems to be around 4,500 Kelvin. Next you
want to set a self-timer this can be anywhere from three seconds to 15 and I found three to
be the sweet spot because that's just enough time to run and hide. So now that the camera is fully
set it's time to choose the best position for it and this should be pretty obvious, you want
to showcase the main areas of your location so make sure your camera has a clear central view
of everything. You will want to avoid it getting too close to objects in the room because this can
cause stitching errors in extreme cases. As long as the lens of the camera is two plus feet away
from anything and yes that includes objects below like couches and tables, you should find that
stitching isn't an issue. To take a shot press the capture button on the camera or your phone and you
want to make sure you're nice and hidden, so find yourself a good hiding spot around the corner and
always be sure to check for reflections because sometimes you think you're hidden but you're not,
because a lot of Interiors have mirrors and reflective surfaces that you probably didn't
realise can see you. From this point the shoot is going to go super fast. All you need to do is move
the camera around the room roughly six feet apart making sure there's a clear line of sight from
shot to shot. If you're shooting an exterior like I am here on the balcony you're going to be a bit
more prone to error because of the sun potentially causing lens flares or washing out your shot. So
I would advise taking multiple shots if you're not quite sure what the best camera placement
is. Sometimes it's best with the seam line facing the sun, sometimes that's not an issue but since
the outdoor area is likely to have higher overall contrast you'll want to try multiple
shots and be sure to download and preview your shots before you move on to make sure you didn't
mess up either the exposure or the stitching. Now go ahead and capture the rest of your location,
again making sure there's a clear line inside from shot to shot. It's always better to overshoot a
location then undershoot it. So if you're not quite confident how everything's going to link
together later, then make sure you get plenty of shots in the common areas like hallways
and big open rooms with multiple door frames in different areas. And that's a wrap, it's time to
edit and the first step of the editing workflow after backing up your files is stitching your
shots. This is a really straightforward process and can be done quickly and easily inside the
free software Insta360 Studio. I would strongly advise doing this on desktop as opposed to mobile
because you're going to get fast superior quality with this workflow. While stitching Insta360
Studio is automatically going to merge all of your shots so you don't have to and I'm just
going to repeat this, you do not need to merge your HDR shots manually in Photoshop Lightroom
or Affinity photo because it's done right here in Insta360 Studio. The next step is exporting your
shots. To do that select all then right click and choose start export. Choose your save location,
don't select this unless you want every single individual exposure. Keep horizon levelling
on and start export. Now that's it we've stitched our shots. If you do want to download my shots to
play with yourself as we move on to the next stage which is color correction,
I'm going to make all of the shots from this shoot available to you guys completely free by going to
virtualtourpro.com/1inch and you'll find them all there to edit to your heart's content. So let's
color correct. And color correction is actually optional depending on how much effort you want to
put into getting your photos as perfect as they can be. If you're someone that wants to shoot a
lot of volume and you don't care so much about color correction you can completely skip this step
because after stitching Insta360 Studio will generate a semi-color corrected PureShot photo
that is good enough to post as is. As you can see here it will export two versions of your photos,
the first one will be the HDR shot with the color correction applied. The second will be
an uncolor corrected version that also has the dng file and within this there's going to be a
lot more information for us to go and color correct if we want to produce an even better
result than the automatic color correction. So I've copied and pasted the dng files from this
shoot into one folder to make things easy, now I'm going to right click all of them and color
correct them inside my favourite color correction software which is Adobe Lightroom. Now I'm going
to bring down the highlights on this dng file. As you can see in this window area bringing
down the highlights brings back a lot of that detail. We also have some shadowy areas under
the sink and elsewhere in the image so I'm going to bring the shadow slider up as well,
I'm going to bring up the vibrant slider to bring some color back into this room. And now
this is starting to look really accurate to how the lighting and colors actually looked
when I was there and just with those three sliders alone, take a look at the before and
after so you can well imagine what spending more time on this image could potentially do.
Now I'm going to copy this edit over to my other photo so it applies similar highlight recovery,
shadow reduction and vibrance and there we go each of these images is looking so good. The copy paste
method works with similar rooms so a lot of the interiors it worked well, however with the balcony
the interior is still a bit dark so I'm going to bring up the shadows all the way, as well as the
exposure and compensate in the highlights by bringing the whites down. Here's the before,
here's the after. That is so much better. Now I'll export these shots from Lightroom as jpegs, since
we're now done with the dngs we got the most out of them so exporting as a large jpeg is fine and
if you want to learn my entire color correction workflow within Adobe Lightroom you can find an
entire Lightroom Master Class inside my Virtual Tour Pro Course. Once you've color corrected the
next step is removing the tripod from your shot and don't worry this shouldn't take too long.
There are two softwares I recommend for this, the first one is TouchRetouch which is relatively
cheap and allows you to navigate around your 360 so you can isolate the tripod without any negative
effects on the equirectangular. The other one is Affinity Photo which has become the definitive
360 photo editing software for editing in 360. Ever since Photoshop dropped its 360 editing
capabilities, Affinity has become the one and only choice for 360 photographers who want to
move around the image as they edit while having most of the functionalities that Photoshop has.
Now after we've painted the tripod out of our 360s there is an optional step which you're more than
welcome to skip, but if you're someone like me that wants to get every last pixel perfect,
every speck of noise wiped away and every line as sharp as it can be, you may want to consider
picking up the Topaz Suite specifically DeNoise and Gigapixel which will help both remove noise
and sharpen and upscale your shards to look twice as sharp as the image you started with.
Again though this is pretty advanced and not necessary in most situations. I can't
stress enough how important it is to follow the right workflow. Look at the difference between a
JPEG straight out of the camera and an edited PureShot HDR dng file. You really can make a
big Improvement by spending a couple of minutes editing. I'd say this took me no longer than 10
minutes total and I was able to significantly enhance the dynamic range, the colors,
the noise and the sharpness which is why I'd recommend following a workflow similar to this
if you're shooting virtual tours professionally for paid clients. Finally all you
need to do is upload your shots to a virtual tour platform and there's no shortage of options here,
there are literally hundreds of virtual tour platforms many of which I cover and compare on
my channel, however if you're a beginner just starting out I would recommend something like
Koola because it's the best bang for your buck and the final results do look pretty professional. If
you really want to use Matterport then the Insta360 cameras that are compatible with it
right now are the One X, One X2 and One R and the 1-inch should be compatible pretty soon.
Keep in mind though that you won't be able to follow the workflows I discussed in this video
since Matterport forces you to shoot within the Matterport app where it chooses all the settings
automatically. Finally you can also upload to Google Street View with any Insta360 camera.
Some cameras make this much easier than others and I will be covering this in depth in one
of my upcoming videos. So now that you know the best workflow for your Insta360 camera,
the next question you probably have is how do I earn my first dollar with virtual tours?
Because knowing that technical skills is one thing but without having the knowledge to
effectively monetize that skill, then it will never become anything more than just a hobby.
Which is why you want to check out my free training that will share my top 10 tips for
starting a profitable virtual tour business from scratch. Happy 360ing and I'll see you there.