Hi Louis, thanks for the informative video. I am wondering about the chrome ball/mirror ball technique. Doesn't taking a photo of a chrome ball only capture a 180 degree surrounding? How do you get a full cubemap out of that?
The mirror ball captures the full 360, this can be seen by waving ones hand behind the mirror ball and seeing it at the very rim of the ball. This also accounts for the lower resolution of the behind scene when stretching out into another projection like equirectangular or cubemap.
just curious. If you took a picture of the reflective gazing ball to raw DNG you would only have to take one pic right? Then the exposure can be adjusted in photoshop to save and combine together? I need all the help I can get right now. I dont have deep enough pockets for anything expensive lol. Great vid though.
unfortunately, you'll probably need to take more pictures, because your camera only captures a certain amount of dynamic range. but 3 pics should be enough (1 normal, 1 very underexposed, 1 very overexposed)
Hey man, great tutorial! I know this is an old video but I have a quick question, for the chrome ball technique, I'd like to take two angles of shooting to cover the absolute full 360° range of lighting (although I know you can just take the pictures from one side). I was wondering how you can do this through Photoshop, and if flexify can be used for this process also? Like how can you successfully stitch the two sets of photos together to make the panorama, and then put that in to flexify if that makes sense? Would be really thankful if you could help me out!
Thanks. So, you want to get the full 360 without the resolution degradation of capturing just one side? I'd probably run through the same process on both images, so you have 2 equirectangular images, then use the offset transform to effectively rotate one so the features align with the other and mask away the lower resolution parts. Not a hugely accurate method. PT Gui could probably align and give you an aligned and stitched output, but I've not tried it with mirror balls.
@@masondececchis1402 Hi, this guy uses the back and front view and fuse them on after effects (but it can be done the same way on photoshop) :ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-CpvgLwQEooo.html
I used the chrome ball for both. I search for baoding balls on ebay. However it was hit and miss for me finding optically good ones, with low distortion.
Great comparison, thank you. This video is 3 years old now, any new recommendations or updated preferences? I'm debating picking up a Theta Z1 or continue to save up for a full $4k camera rig.
I think I'd go for the Z1 now too. The variable aperture and high shutter speed should address the exposure issue I was having with the old thetas. I've not used the full camera rig in a long time.
So Theta S shoots jpegs that can be merged to HDR, then used for lighting? Isn't it better to use raw images? I use a dslr and shoot raw to create HDRIs, but it's such a long process. I'm looking into the mi sphere because it's a 360 camera that shoots raw.
Because you can't underxpose it enough aka the sun is clipping aka the sun is actually really small. No way around it without using some ND filters with at least 10 stops.
If I was buying today I'd go for the Theta Z1. It seems to beat most of the competitors at photo quality, has variable aperture and I'm used to the system.
For the lens, I really like the Sigma 8mm f3.5. I think the camera is more flexible but I've found a full frame camera works well, I've used Canon 5D's and now use a Sony A7RII.