- We talked about a spherical projection
and now we want to mention a cylindrical projection.
It's really fairly similar except
it does not allow us to view very high
in the image
so the field of view is around 120 degrees maximum.
But you'll use this
for example if you have one row panorama
and you have a single lens,
rotate around and it's actually quite easy to create.
- Yeah what I find
is that for most folks,
this is the type that you get started with.
If you don't have any specialty equipment
and you're not shooting with a fish eye lens,
this is the easiest type to create.
In fact, Photoshop has had support
for this type of image for years
and I even have a Photoshop action
that will make it easy to match up the left side
to the right side of the photo
so you do get a full 360.
Now this is my preferred method
if I'm really running and gunning pretty quickly
and I don't have specialty equipment with me.
And it also works very well inside of tools
like Adobe After Effects
where I can wrap that into a simple cylinder type object
and then drop people in with green screen
or chroma key.
And it works quite well for those multi media type uses.
Ron, why is this method so prevalent?
Is it really just that it's the easiest type to create?
- In my experience, yes.
I started out creating cylindrical images
and there was a lot less difficulties involved.
Actually, in the old days,
when we started to tilt up and down,
that actually made it quite a bit more difficult to stitch.
Things have gotten a lot better
so I don't think that's still very true.
- But if you don't have access
to professional grade software
or the latest version of Lightroom
which does now add the ability to do spherical
in some cases,
you might find it easier to work with cylindrical.
Those of you that are using an older version
of Photoshop or some of the free tools
that are out there,
this might be easier way to get started.
- It still has the wow factor.
- Yeah, it still makes good images.
So and I also think that this is one
of the preferred methods
when I'm doing printing,
if I intend to make a flat print,
I prefer cylindrical.
Do you have any different opinions on that?
- Yeah when we mentioned with the spherical,
there tends to be more and more distortion
as you go vertically
so a lot of times,
that's not very appropriate to print.
However, if you have a spherical image,
you can still choose the area
of the image that you wished to print
so you're not quite as limited
as you would be with the cylindrical.
- All right so it's worth exploring
and there is one more method which really deals
with wrapping things around
the inside of a cube.