Hey guys, it’s Gaba VR, and I will show you my workflow,
how I shoot and edit professional 360 photos for virtual tours with DSLRs.
In the previous episode of this mini-series I made a comparison between 360 cameras and DSLRs,
among others, talking about the main differences in workflow and image quality.
And in the upcoming videos I will focus on DSLRs, showing you a detailed shooting method step by step,
showing my color grading and basic editing process, my manual stitching workflow
and all the final retouching steps, like nadir correction with metadata injection.
So after all you will see how simple or difficult is to shoot 360 photos with DSLRs.
In this episode I will talk about shooting and retouching,
and in the upcoming episode I show you everything about manual stitching and the final touches.
So if you don’t wanna miss that episode, please subscribe now,
turn on the notifications, and let’s jump into it!
I shoot with a cropped sensor DSLR camera and an 8mm fisheye lens,
using a steady tripod and a pano head for the best result.
I usually calibrate my basic camera position on the pano head beforehand,
but to avoid parallax issue, there’s one thing I have to set up each time during shooting.
Actually, there’s a scale on the side of the panohead, and I know, where my camera should be,
using the same lens,
but I do this calibration process every time before shooting.
I always have a light stand with me, and I put it in front of the camera,
making sure, that it’s in line with a vertical line in the distance.
When I pan around with the camera, it should stay in the same position.
If it’s not, I move the camera a little bit forwards or backwards.
When it seems fine, I can be sure that there will be no parallax issues in the image,
and it will look perfect in 360.
I shoot with full manual exposure.
This way I can blend the images perfectly without any color and exposure differences between the shots.
I set up quite a long exposure with a narrow aperture to keep everything sharp in the image.
Fisheye lenses have a natively deep depth of field, but if you want a nice crispy image,
make sure you don’t shoot with the widest aperture.
I usually shoot with f11 or 16.
Shooting indoors usually we don’t have much light, and with such a narrow aperture,
in most of the cases my exposure can be quite long.
So avoiding motion blur, I always set up a 2-second self timer
to make sure that the camera won’t be shaking after I press the shutter button.
Of course, you can use a remote, too.
It depends on your preferences.
But when everything seems fine, I start shooting with a 2-second self timer.
I take at least 6 photos, but in most of the cases I take 9, 10 or even more in one single location.
It depends on the scene, but I don’t like putting important objects on the stitchline,
so usually, I turn around in smaller steps and shoot more.
And shooting against the windows I take 2 or 3 pictures to capture everything at the full dynamic range,
and I do some bracketing afterwards.
It’s very important that I don’t move the camera between the different shots.
And I have to remember my shutter speed settings to reset it after taking the underexposed photos.
And besides taking more pictures with panning horizontally, I take a zenith and two nadir photos, too.
Taking two images with a 90 degrees turn, I can remove the panohead totally during editing.
So that’s how my raw materials look like straight out of the camera.
Then I import my raw photos into Lightoom.
It has a couple of advantages over Photoshop.
First, I can keep all the metadata, so it will help me during stitching.
I can do all the basic corrections I need, editing the main photo of the series,
and when I’m done with my first image, I can copy all the settings to the other images.
As I was shooting with manual settings,
this way I can still keep the same image style and look for the whole panorama.
Maybe I do some local adjustments using a radial filter,
making sure that it doesn’t affect the edges of the image,
so I it won’t affect the stitching later.
After exporting the edited photos it’s time to erase the panohead and do the bracketing at the windows.
I always try to compose the windows to one or two photos,
because the more pictures are affected in bracketing, the more jobs I have during post-production.
I import the normal and underexposed photos into Photoshop,
and I make this correction manually, using a mask.
Then I import the nadir photos and erase the panohead with the same masking technique.
As you can see, there’s a strong fisheye distortion in the image, so I won’t do the full nadir correction yet.
I keep it for a further step, and go forward to stitching.
So in the upcoming episode I show you how I create a panorama, stitching these 10 images, I have this time,
and you will see the final touches I do for the perfect result.
Until that, if you have any questions about the shooting method, leave a comment below,
and of course, if you liked this short video, please thumbs up,
and for further 360 contents and tutorials, please subscribe to my channel, and see you next time!