- One of the things that's a bit tricky
to initially wrap your head around,
is how the panoramic images are actually wrapped.
It's a bit like a globe, right?
If we're taking a look at a globe
and then you were to unfold that globe into a flat object
it wouldn't look exactly right.
- Right, when we look at a map on our wall of the world,
Canada is not that big.
If we look at it on a globe, it looks like the right size.
- [Rich] And that's because there's some distortion
as we take the large image
and then have to wrap it around a 3D object.
When you view a panoramic photography,
particularly interactive panoramic photography,
you as the viewer have navigation controls
to pan left and right and tilt up and down and zoom in.
As such, as you start to look around,
the scene needs to react and this really leads to some
different type of resolution requirements.
So one of the most common ways
that this is often accomplished
is with a spherical projection method.
Ron, what are looking at here with spherical?
- [Ron] Well, if you can imagine yourself
standing in the center of a sphere and the image
is projected on the interior of that sphere around you.
So as you turn, it has to turn with you.
- [Rich] And this produces a pretty immersive environment,
but it does mean that as you're not looking straight ahead
but start to look up or down,
it's kind of curving a little bit, right?
- Just like a planetarium, even though
the planetarium is half a sphere I suppose,
when you're looking there, you're looking
at a projection that's on the inside of that partial sphere.
If you extend that to the floor,
now you have a full spherical image.
- [Rich] And what works well here
is because there's no hard corners,
you don't really see any edges.
It does produce a very pleasant result
that makes it easy to look around.
So, if you're trying to create a full
ability to look up and down and actually see
a more immersive environment, this works pretty well, right?
This is really the standard method?
- That's one of the two that you want.
There's also a cubical method we'll talk about later,
but one of the advantages to the spherical image is
that it's a single image and I can post-process
or I can work on that image all at one time.
- That means that you can actually do things
like just open it back up and Photoshop
after the fact to touch things up.
Maybe there's a distraction, or somebody who gets cut off
as they move through the scene
or an object that appears twice.
We can use tools like Content-Aware tools
to actually clean this up and remove things.
- [Ron] And it's convenient to have this for post-processing
because I can work on the entire image at once.
One of those things that Rich mentioned
are also global adjustments.
If I add for example contrast,
it's added to the entire image.
Where if I'm using cubical images, then I'll have six,
and so it's not as convenient for that use.
- The spherical projection method
is one of the most common ones you'll encounter
and as we're using some of our different tools
whether it be a fisheye lens
or a multi-row type solution to shoot it,
this is going to be a very easy type of image to create
and we'll explore different post-production tools
a little later.