Here is an outdoor HDR 360 photo captured with the NEW DualFisheye RAW 9 bracketed photos from
the Ricoh Theta Z1. You can see the hot sun and the shadow of the tree clearly. Here is
the regular Theta Z1 photo of the same spot. You see the differences in dynamic range.
If you watch my last Theta Z1 review video, you know taking nine bracketed photos takes
less than 1 second. But if you merged them internally in HDR, it takes about 45 seconds.
You can save 44-second your client's time by moving this process in post-production.
Let's take a look at another scenario - using Xphase Pro X2 to capture
high-resolution HDR 360 photos for Virtual Tour. Here is the result from Xphase PanoManager. It
has this strange purple color cast, and very high noise. Let's do a side-by-side comparison
with a manual HDR: Now you see a huge improvement. The GREEN Starbucks logo here and the blue sticker
are lost in the original Xphase PanoManager result. They all come back in manual HDR
stitch. The manual result is also very low noise. So you see the value of doing your own HDR in post
photo editing. For both Theta Z1 and Xphase Pro X2 or S2.
You can follow this in-depth tutorial to do exposure blending or Photomatix HDR.
But the problem is, those solutions are not FREE. Lightroom can do HDR as well,
but it is also not FREE and it does not support 360 photos and will generate stitch line.
You are in luck for those of you who want to save money on HDR software and still want to
achieve professional results. Today, I am going to teach you SNS-HDR Lite workflow,
which is FREE, to create stunning 360 HDR photos for Virtual Tours. Let's dive right in.
Hey, what's up, everybody. It is your Boi Hugh here from CreatorUp. No time to waste,
let's go to SNS-HDR website and download the free SNS-HDR Lite command-line tool. Sorry,
that's Window only. For Mac users, you will want to purchase the Pro version
or get Photomatix Pro - which tutorial is detailed here.
Go ahead and install it and go to your installation folder. For me is under C drive
Program folder. Double click on SNS-HDR.exe will show you all the settings. As you see,
SNS-HDR supports 360 photos, even in FREE Version.
Drop a thank you to the developer. We move it a side and will come back to it later.
Now right click on SNS-HDR.exe and create a shortcut on your desktop. Right-click on the
shortcut, in the target, copy and paste this line of code AFTER the .exe quotation mark.
Bring back the windows of instruction here. As you see -pm enable 360 photo HDR.
-interior is for virtual tour. If you are shooting landscape or outdoor, use -landscape. We always
want TIFF 16-bit so -tiff16. We use srgb as color profit. If you don't want to understand all these
codes, just copy my settings in the description of this video. Hit apply and save the shortcut.
Now how to get individual HDR bracketed exposure stitched 360 photos from the Xpahse Pro X2 or S2?
Thanks to Dean Zwikel. I totally butcher his last name. Sorry Dean. He develops a plugin ORI2EEXP
that will turn ORI files into individual bracketed DNG photos, as you see here.
Then with these individual bracketed photos, I can manually merge them with SNS-HDR. I usually
exclude color shift and problematic DNGs and only pick the good ones. So select all the good ones
and drop it directly on top of the SNS-HDR.exe shortcut we just edited. It will just do its
thing. In a couple of seconds, a beautiful 16-BIT TIFF file will be generated. That is the secret
why some professionals can generate such a beautiful DSLR quality 360 photo with the
Xpahse Pro series. If this help, give me a thumb up and drop me a thank you comment down below.
For Theta Z1 is a lot easier. I will follow this Z1 with Affinity Photo tutorial to
batch stitch that 9 bracketed photo out. I am assuming you do not have Adobe Lightroom here.
Then just drop these 9 TIFF files into the same SNS-HDR.exe,
and it will generate that beautiful HDR 360 you saw in the intro of this video for you!
If you like SNS-HDR, I do recommand purchasing their Pro version to get GUI supports. So
you do not need to do the shortcut hack. But the workflow is the same. Sometimes,
less option is better. Lite is all I need to get a good HDR photo.
Thank you for watching. I hope this helps some of you on a budget but still want
to get the absolute best result of your Virtual Tour. For Xphase Pro series users,
this workflow is kinda a must right now. You can also do the whole HDR merge thing in PTGui 12
without using any third party hack and command lines. But I will save it for my official
Xphase Pro X2 review and tutorial video. Don't forget to subscribe to support this channel,
and share with me your creative works using any knowledge you learn from this channel.
Tell me how I can help more in the comment session down below. And I will see you next time!