The Ultimate Guide for Easy Awesome VR Panoramas

1. an harder work will be needed to find exact identical control points between images
2. it will be much more difficult to build a perfect transition between an image and the adjacent one

1. you can easily keep it in your shirt pocket and mount it in less than a minute
2. you can use it with any lens or camera
3. you can build it very quickly in place if you forget it at home
4. people will not have time to get scared, seeing you mounting the gear, and to run away
5. you can move away if you need, and come back in position with no consequences, e.g. taking a panorama in the middle of the street
6. you can use it in museums or other places where tripod is forbidden, altough taking pictures without a flash will give you a hard time

1. you obviously will not able to shot gigapixel images, you can use a lens not longer than 20mm
2. you need a lot of light to shot handheld, so you can't use it in low light conditions, nevertheless you can sometimes use the flash
3. you'll surely have big alignment errors, so it works better on open spaces, as a square, without any subject close by
4. you'll be susceptible to strong wind which will make your plumb line an oblique useless plumb line, so you can use a more heavy (and  cool) plumb as in picture
5. people who unfortunately hadn't time to run away will look at you as an insane man
6. you are going to waste some minutes explaining to the bravest what you're doing, but they won't understand anyway
7. sometimes you'll stumble on it and it'll take about 20 minutes to untangle the knots, in that case the cool new plumb becomes very useful

1. an higher place will let you show much more interesting subjects and avoid to waste half panorama photographing the ground
2. if the ground has a geometric symmetrical motif you can make the image more interesting choosing its central point
3. if you can, try to stay in a shady place, because sun will otherwise be in at least one of the pictures and will create bothersome reflections, with different artifacts in adjacent photos
4. try not to stay too close to any subject, like utility poles, traffic lights, trees, and regular people passing while you're shooting
5. don't forget to pay attention to the electricity cables over the streets, because you will need to check they're aligned in the final panorama
6. audacious locations like the edge of a cliff, the top of a stone, the center of a traffic congested square, the bow of a ship, would give a unique feel to the astonished visitor, but I'm not suggesting you to try to kill yourself!
7. also less dangerous unique spots should make the panorama more interesting, like the center of a drain on the street, a chair in a church, a motorcycle seat, anything that isn't a boring empty space

1. the method you use to take the pictures: if you're using an automatic pano-head you can easily avoid blind areas, so you can reduce overlapping to 10-15%
2. the type of subject: if there are many uniform areas (like sky, fog) or changeable surfaces (like water, flags, animal herds, people crowd, fast clouds) or also recurring elements (like in four cardinal points of Milan Gallery) you'll need a wider overlapping to give the program more CP and maybe more chances to avoid half-body or double-head humans (!!)
3. the variability of light conditions and of the colours: the more you overlap the pictures, the wider the graduated shading between them will be (fast changing cloudy weather, a disco-party with coloured lights...)

Obviously you'll surely expect to find the tripod or the photographer feet at the bottom side of any 360°panorama... and indeed you'll find it in many cases. But any professional and meticulous photographer will abhor that! So it's essential to find a way to hide these unrelated elements. You have three possibilities:

1. you can replace them with a more professional element, like a circle or a sphere with your contact data:you've to elaborate the final image to do this, and we'll see that in last steps
2. you can recreate the ground or the pavement with some postprocessing work: we'll see that too
3. you can try to empty the area under your camera when you shoot the nadir: in this case you have to take more shots (maybe 4 instead of one if your're using a wide-angle lens like mine) moving away your feet or tilting the tripod so that neither shoes or tripod legs will appear in images

The last technique is obviously the one that lets you stitch the images faster, but it's not always possible.
I bet that if you are a diligent student you have already noticed that ghosts have no shadow, hiding your own shadow needs the same trickery as the nadir cleaning, look the following animated gif to see how to take two different shots so that the software hide the most part of the shadow, then you have to hide the remaining part by hand.

1. importing raw files into library
2. developing them adjusting color, exposure, contrast, etc.
3. exporting them as jpg files (your stitching program will need less time to transform jpeg files, but in case you don't care about time, you should save them as 16bit tiff)

1. If your panorama is wider than 8000 px you have to make a smaller copy to load into PTEditor, in my case it crashes when I use bigger images, but keep your original file, you'll need it!
2. After opening your reduced panorama into PTEditor you can turn around the view dragging on the image, and zooming in and out with shft or ctrl+left click.
3. When you have the exact frame, including the zone you want to modify and an additional sample pavement around that, you can Edit -> Extract Partial View.
4. You have a tiff image now (maybe you have to rename it if you opened a jpg in PTEditor) and you can retouch it in Photoshop.
5. After you've fixed the floor/ground/pavement/chair you can save the tiff and reload it into PTEditor with Edit -> Insert Saved View, then save the panorama and close PTEditor.
6. Now, if you had to reduce the panorama, you should merge the new pavement area on the original file, simply overlay the new equirectangular image (enlarging it) on the original one, and finally hide everything with a mask except the fixed region.