How to Create a 360 x 180 Degree Panorama

• Buy the Hardware
• Find the No-Parallax Point of Your Lens
• Take Some Photos
• Stitch Photos Together With Hugin
• Make a Logo To Cover Your Tripod
• View the Photo in 3D with Panini

Buy the Hardware

• Fish-eye Lens
• DSLR Camera
• Tripod
• Panoramic Head
• Remote Switch
• Computer (high performance much appreciated)

Fish-eye Lens

It’s very difficult to make a 360° x 180° panorama using a standard lens. If you have a standard 24mm point-and-shoot camera lens (crop factor about 1.6), it takes 12 photos (portrait orientation) to get a 360° photo, and that’s just one row. Even after that 12-photo series, you’ll still only have a a 360° x 50° panorama. How do you photograph the rest of the scene, including the zenith (top) and nadir (bottom)? The answer is you either spend all day to take one picture (hopefully the clouds don’t move!) or you upgrade your hardware.

The best kind of lens for a panorama is a fish-eye lens. The main types are spherical and full-frame. Spherical fish-eye lenses capture the widest angle of view and produce a circular image. Full-frame fish-eye lenses produce a square image but at the cost of a reduced angle of view. With a spherical fish-eye lens, you can take a 360° x 180° panorama in 3-4 photos. With a full-frame fish-eye lens, you’ll need up to 8 photos. Even so, I decided to buy a full-frame fish-eye lens because the price was right. I’m very happy with my Samyang 8 mm f/3,5 Aspherical IF MC Fish-eye, which I bought for about $300. The only drawback to this lens is its lack of interface with my DSLR, but I don’t mind since panoramas should be done in manual mode anyway.

DSLR

In order to use your fish-eye lens, you’re going to need a DSLR camera. I’m happy with my low-end Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS. I paid about $550 for mine.

Panoramic Head

You can now use your new camera and lens to take some wide-angle photos, but if you’re not using a tripod with a panoramic head, you’re never going to get the photos to stitch together properly on your computer. You might actually need to buy a new keyboard after you smash yours from frustration (maybe). You might get away with hand-held shots if you’re only photographing the horizon, but the paralax error is too great when you’re shooting a full 360° x 180° panorama. Even very slight changes in the position of the no-parallax point of your camera between photos can cause disaster when it comes time to join the photos together, especially when you’re dealing with objects that are close to you, such as the ground. An alternative is to use the Philopod Technique to try to rotate the camera about its no-parallax point, but that method simply did not work for me at all.

Anyway, what you’re going to need is a tripod and a panoramic head. These can be very expensive, depending on the features you’re looking for. If you’re going to be a panoramic photographer, then I’d say a good panoramic head is definitely worth the money. I’m just a dabbler, so I looked for a cheap one. If you’re a handy-man, you can build your own panoramic head. I’m not, though, so I bought a Panosaurus Panoramic Tripod Head for $86. I’m fairly happy with it, since it fits in my camera bag and does the job. However, it’s not as stable as I’d like, and if you want to keep it fully spherical (able to take pictures straight up and down for the zenith and nadir shots), then you have to use a flat-head screw to secure the camera onto the panoramic head. I’m not a big fan of setting up my photography equipment with a screwdriver, but it works.

Remote Switch

Finally, you’ll need a remote switch to prevent the whole setup from shaking every time you take a picture. These are fairly cheap. I got my Shoot Remote Switch for under $10.

My setup costs just under $1000, but I already had the DSLR. Here it is:

Find the No-Parallax Point of Your Lens

The no-parallax point is point about which you can rotate your camera without getting parallax error (a difference in perspective between foreground and background). Here is what the PanoTools.org Wiki says about it:

It is the is the center of the lens’s entrance pupil, a virtual aperture within the lens. In the panorama photography community, this special point is often called the “nodal point”, but it is in fact unrelated to the actual nodal points of the lens.

Even if you don’t quite understand what the no-parallax point is, you can easily setup your panoramic head by following the directions given in this video: Panoramic photography – how to find the Nodal Point (no parallax point) of your lens… . I wont attempt to compete with their excellent tutorial here, so just check it out.

Take Some Photos

There are a number of things to take into account when you decide how to take the actual photos you will use for your panorama:

• Number of Photos Needed For a 360° x 180° Panorama
• Exposure
• Speed

First off, all of this is going to vary depending on your hardware, and the best tutorial is trial-and-error. With that said, I’m going to talk about my own setup. For some help with other setups, check out this nifty Table of the Number of Pictures Required for 360° Panoramas for Various Lenses.

Number of Photos Needed For a 360° x 180° Panorama

My lens has a Horizontal Field of View of 159.27° and a Vertical Field of View of about 83.8°. The best way I’ve found to create a 360° x 180° panorama is to take 6 portrait-oriented photos spaced 60 degrees apart, then take a separate zenith (top) and nadir (bottom) shot. That’s 8 photos total. However, with my Panosaurus Panoramic Tripod Head, the nadir is ruined by part of the panoramic head. My solution is to take two nadirs with the arm of my Panosaurus pivoted 180 degrees between the two. That way, I can edit out the arm with panoramic software.

In summary, I need 9 photos for every panorama.

Exposure

You could easily take all your photos using your camera’s automatic exposure adjustments, but they wont make a good panorama. The exposure needs to match from image to image, or you’ll be able to see exactly where the photos were stitched together, even with the best software exposure blending. Your camera will try to adjust for the best exposure for the current image, which may not be the best setting for the overall panorama. For this reason, you need to shoot panoramas in manual mode and decide on the best settings yourself.

Manual exposure adjustment is hard. You should learn about it from an expert, perhaps this guy. For a daylight outdoor scene, I usually keep my ISO at 100, my aperture near F/8 – F/11, and I use the DSLR’s exposure meter to tell me where the shutter speed should be. However, I’ve often gone wrong with these settings. The key is trial and error. Also, take some practice shots and use your viewfinder to watch out for over- and under-exposure.

Speed

Finally, if you are shooting by sunlight, you need to take the whole series of photos as quickly as possible. If you are outdoors, the clouds are going to move and screw up your alignment or cover the sun and screw up your exposure.

That’s all there is to it. Here are the photos I took for a recent panorama:

Stitch Photos Together With Hugin

Hugin is free, open-source, cross-platform panorama photo stitching software comparable to any commercial panorama software. It’s excellent. Download it and follow along.

The first step is to open Hugin and press Load:

Then, in the file browser dialog that comes up, select the photos you will be using for your panorama. When you’re finished, click Open and you should see the following dialog. Make sure you select the correct lens type. Hugin will probably automatically detect your focal length multiplier (aka crop factor) from the image metadata. If it doesn’t, then you need to look that up for your specific DSLR. Mine was in the manual. Anyway, after you fill in the focal length of your lens along with the rest of that information, Hugin will automatically calculate the Horizontal Field of View (HFOV) for your images as shown below.

Depending on your Hugin settings, the application may automatically start generating control points and trying to align your images at this point. If it does, it will show you the dialog window below to show you what it is doing. Otherwise, you’ll need to start this process yourself by pressing the Align button (located just below the Load button).

Even though Hugin tries hard to put this together for you, it’s never completely successful. Here’s the status of the panorama after automatic alignment:

So Hugin did find 207 control points which are points that look to be from the same part of the scene from two different images. Unfortunately, Hugin is telling us that the panorama is still a bad fit. We’ll have to take a look at the control points manually. Head to the Control Point tab and pull up two adjacent images using the drop-lists (Hugin might default to opening the same image on both sides, which doesn’t make any sense). The goal here is to find points from both images that are the same part of the scene. You’ll have to do this for every adjacent pair of images. Yes, this does include linking each of the 6 portrait images to both the zenith and nadir shots. It’s a tedious task, but it’s the only way to do it if Hugin doesn’t do it automatically. I sometimes get away with just a few control points between some adjacent images (I say as an absolute minimum you should have three points between images). You can play with the auto add, auto estimate, and auto fine-tune toggle buttons at the bottom right-hand corner of the control point editor. These automatic features are a big help for the portrait shots, but when the perspective is skewed (such as for the zenith and nadir shots), these features are better left turned off. You should also get used to adjusting the Zoom drop-list, because you’ll often have to switch between fit to window and 100%.

Control Point Tips:

• Hugin often adds control points to the sky, water, and other surfaces that are transient or have smooth textures. You should automatically delete any of these control points, because they are usually misaligned. I often end up deleting half of the control points automatically generated by the Auto-SIFT-C application bundled with Hugin.
• The clouds move, so try not to put control points in the clouds. If you have to, though, use the clouds that are far away (they move slower).
• Leaves and branches also move, so if you have to put control points on these, try to focus on the large branches that don’t move in the wind.
• Avoid bunching all your control points in the same location. Find points that are spread apart to help with alignment.

You also need to set a few horizontal or vertical lines to help Hugin determine the correct orientation for your panorama. If there is a man-made structure that you know is vertical or horizontal in your scene, then pull up the photo with that object into both sides of the control point editor. On one side of the editor, find a point on one end of the edge of the object. On the other side of the editor, find a point on the other end of that same edge. Hugin will automatically assume that you are assigning a line instead of a control point, as indicated in the Alignment column of your control point list. See the image below:

Once you’re done with your control points (finally!), head back to the assistant tab and try re-aligning:

Hopefully, you get a better fit. If not, go though your control points again and look in the Distance column. Distances greater than 3 make for a poor fit. Edit or delete mis-aligned control points if you think they’re in the wrong place. If you do this and re-align, and you still don’t get a good fit, don’t fret. The panorama might look just fine anyway. Just do your best, try it, and you can edit the points later if the stitch doesn’t turn out right. For this project, I never got a Good Fit, but the panorama looks pretty good.

Next, head to the Mask tab and add a new mask around any object you don’t want in the final result. Warning: if you mask an area that isn’t in any of the other photos, the resulting panorama will show only black for the masked region. Only mask objects that you know are in an alternate photo. I usually mask only the arm of the panoramic head, as shown in the image below. Hint: it isn’t very intuitive, but to complete a mask, you have to right-click.

Next, head to the Optimizer tab and hit the Optimize Now button. Then, head to the Exposure tab and hit the Optimize Now button.

Take a look at your progress so far by clicking on the Fast Panorama Preview icon:

I pretty much just use this for the Move/Drag tab. The Straighten button is pretty handy if you drag the wrong way. Don’t worry if your image looks all screwed up in here. It’s just a preview (and not a very accurate one). When you’re done, close the preview window and head to the Stitcher tab.

For full panoramas, you don’t need to change anything on this tab. Just press the Stitch Now button on the bottom right and save the resulting TIFF file wherever you want it.

Assuming there’s no major flaws in your image, you’re done with Hugin!

Make a Logo to Cover Your Tripod

These are the steps we’re going to follow to cover up the tripod in the panorama:

• Determine the Proper Logo Size
• Design the Logo
• Change the Logo Perspective For Use As a GIMP Layer
• Add The Logo To Your Panorama

For this, you’re going to need the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) as well as some familiarity with using it. If you are more familiar with another image editor, feel free to perform these steps in Photoshop or Paint.NET, but I’ll walk through how to do it in GIMP.

Determine the Proper Logo Size

First, open your panorama in GIMP and create a new layer as shown below:

By default, GIMP will make the layer the same size as your panorama layer. That’s perfect, so don’t change it. Also, we want a transparent layer (default).

Next, make sure you have the new layer selected in the Layers Dialog and use the Rectangle Select Tool to select the entire area you want covered by your tripod logo. Then, fill the selection with white as shown below:

We’re going to make a new image from this white layer, so we need to get rid of the background. We can do this by simply making it invisible before we save:

Finally, save the image as a TIF. Let’s say we call this tripod_logo_rectangular_template.tif. GIMP will ask if you want to export visible layers, and the answer is yes. Just FYI, we made the rectangle white because Hugin displays transparency as black, so a black rectangle on transparent background would be invisible in Hugin. Anyway, we can close GIMP for now and open tripod_logo.tif in Hugin. Open Hugin, click the Load Images button, and select tripod_logo_rectangular_template.tif. Hugin always needs to know the Lens Type and Horizontal Field of View for images you load, so when the dialog pops up, you need to tell Hugin that this is already a 360 degree panorama, as shown below:

You’ll get the following warning, but just ignore it:

Now for the tricky part. We will re-orient the 360° image to simulate looking down by changing the Pitch to -90°. Also, we will need to change the Yaw to 180° to ensure the resulting circle is centered in our field of view. We can do all this from within the Fast Panorama Preview, so feel free to try it there where you can see the results, but I prefer not to use the preview on my shitty computer because it’s prohibitively slow.

Take a look at the Stitcher tab. For some reason, Hugin’s canvas size will default to 3000 x 1500 pixels, even though the image we loaded was originally 6490 x 3245 pixels. So change that canvas size back to the dimensions of your panorama.

That’s it. Just push the Stitch Now button and save the file as tripod_logo_circular_template.tif. Now we have a template for the tripod logo that is the exact size we need to cover the tripod. When we’re done customizing it, we can open it back up in Hugin and turn it back into a stretched-out rectangle. Then, we can layer it over our panorama in GIMP.

Design the Logo

I’m not going to cover the specifics on how to design a logo here. Just open tripod_logo_circular_template.tif in GIMP and make it look as good as you can with your existing GIMP skills. Here’s what I came up with for this image:

Change the Logo Perspective For Use As a GIMP Layer

Once you’re done designing your logo (using the template we created earlier to ensure it’s the right size), save it as tripod_logo_circular_final.tif and be sure to include all the transparent empty space you started with. Your image should still have the same dimensions as your panorama.

Next, open it in Hugin. Just as before, you need to specify that it is an equirectangular image and the Horizontal Field of View is 360°. Go to the Images tab and change the pitch to -90. That’s really all you have to do for this step, but if you prefer, you can open up the Fast Panorama Preview dialog and change the Yaw in the Move/Drag tab until your logo is oriented better. For example, if you have wrapped text, then you might want to change the yaw until your sentence reads from right to left in the resulting equirectangular image. 360° x 180° images like this aren’t meant for viewing in equirectangular mode, but it doesn’t hurt to make it look better anyway. Here’s mine as seen in the preview dialog after adjusting the yaw a little:

When you’re done, just go back to the stitcher tab. Again, you’re going to need to change the Canvas Size back to the size of the original panorama. Then, press the Stitch Now button. Save the resulting TIF image as tripod_logo_rectangular_final.tif.

Add The Logo To Your Panorama

Now open your panorama in GIMP again. From the File menu, select Open as Layer and select the tripod_logo_rectangular_final.tif image you just created. Your panorama is basically done at this point. Here’s what mine looks like in GIMP:

Now is the perfect time to do some post-processing. I usually adjust the Hue, Saturation, and Levels of the background image. Make sure you have the background layer selected before you start tweaking, though. Finally, save your finished product. I usually save it as both a GIMP project file (.xcf) and as a high-quality JPG. Here’s my finished equirectangular panorama:

View the Photo in 3D with Panini

So far, my favorite panorama viewer is Panini. It’s simple and yet does everything you need it to do well. Just download and install it, then open up the program and click on the Source menu, then select equirectangular:

Next, navigate to your panorama and open it. You’ll see the following dialog confirming that Panini has guessed the right field of view. Just say OK:

It’s really fun to look around in Panini. Here it is in action, looking slightly downward so you can see the tripod logo:

If you want to share with others, try uploading to 360 Cities, ViewAt.org, or panoramas.dk. I prefer 360 Cities, and I’ve uploaded a few images there (My 360 Cities Page).

Here’s the finished product:

I hope this tutorial is helpful. That’s all!