Video: A complete video guide to stitching spherical panoramas

The following video tutorials you are about to see are going to show you how to shoot and stitch together spherical 360° photos. There are five parts. In the first installment you will see how to shoot photos, in the second part you will learn how to process your photos on a computer. The third part is dedicated to stitching photos together and in the fourth you will see various tricks for retouching stitching errors in your panoramas.

The end result of your efforts should be a fully spherical 360° photo in which you can turn around in all directions and also up and down. The author of these videos is +Florian Knorn – I definitely recommend you adding him on Google+ and also make sure you look at his website http://www.pano.ie/.

Let’s first go through the necessary equipment checklist you will need to try the practices shown in this video on your own:

Camera:
- Any digital SLR camera (full frame or crop factor)

Lens:
- Any fisheye 8mm lens (you can also use a different focal length for the techniques shown in the video but you will need to take a different amount of photos)

Software for preprocessing of your photos:
- Adobe Lightroom for processing your photos (you can also simply use Adobe Photoshop / Camera Raw or any other program for basic RAW developing)

Software for stitching photos:
- PTGUI program (paid) or Hugin (which is a free equivalent of PTGUI – in many ways PTGUI is better but there are also things in which Hugin is better)

1. Video: How to create 360° fully spherical photos without a visible tripod

2. Video: How to post-process your photos

3. Video: How to stitch 360° panoramas on a computer

4. Video: How to Erase Tripods and Shadows From Spherical Panoramas

You should also read the Introduction to Effective 360° Photography.