Barney Meyer

Hi Edward Once you have a 360x180° panorama the job is almost done. Now all that you must do is add the Sphere Metadata to the panorama and Facebook will recognise it. This is quite a good YouTube video which shows how to capture a panorama, then use Google maps to add the metadata. Work through it carefully and you will have success! Regds, Barney

Hi Raphael. I have been stitching large images for many years, typically 3Gpx from my drone and 5Gpx or more from my SonyA7R4. Honestly, Photoshop and Affinity are not well suited to stitching large panoramas, especially not full spherical panos. They'll do OK with a few image frames with lots of overlap, but the problem is that you have no control over the process. PTGUI Pro looks at adjacent frames to find points of correspondence and creates stitching points. Here's an example of a drone aerial, drone DJI Mini3Pro 36000x18000px = 648Mpx And here you can see the seamlessly stitched panorama, which is a 360x180° view from the drone https://www.hiddenmelbourne.com.au/camberwell-town-hall/ regds, Barney

Waveluke, I agree with you 100%. Capturing these huge panoramic views is also a difficult physical feat as all the gear has to be carried in packs, access is via steep ladders and small hatches, so the gear must be hauled up with a rope in separate stages, then unpacked and assembled. I now use a 3m to 9m extensible pole to be able to hoist the camera above any objects on the tower. But a 400mm lens presents a major problem with depth of field. It is very rare to get viewing conditions suitable for such a long lens and I find that a 50mm lens gives me a 3Gpx full 360x180deg panorama and has "acceptable" depth of field so that the near objects have a slight but acceptable blur. Hotham Town Hall is on the NW edge of the CBD and I captured a 3Gpx 360x180deg panorama with a 50mm lens. The blur and halos of close objects is acceptable and the resolution is good enough to reveal all the old city towers. The View and Visit flags allow the viewer to travel through time and space. I am crouching down at the foot of the flagpole😀 https://www.hiddenmelbourne.com.au/hotham-from-clocktower/

dannyg9 Good question and I spent some time puzzling this out. The Photoshop link https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/image-size-resolution.html says: Photoshop supports a maximum pixel dimension of 300,000 by 300,000 pixels per image. This restriction places limits on the print size and resolution available to an image. That's a whopping 90Gpx image size, but PS can't handle any image of wider or taller dimensions. My hardware can support very large images (using Affinity Photo) but Photoshop has this absolute dimensional limitation. To edit in Photoshop I would have to use a separate app to slice the image in two 300kpx wide frames, edit each then join them again. This is not feasible for edits like tonemapping as it's difficult to achieve that crossing a boundary.

Thanks Mate! Love the many creative designs on Kevincreative!😀

Heymrdj, the client's hardware is too light for working with large image files, especially multilayered files. I am working with very large multiframe captures and stitching multi-gigapixel panoramas. WIndows 10x64, 64GB RAM, 1TB fast SSD, several 16TB hard drives and I'm still feeling that I need more RAM and a better processor than my AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12 core 3.8Ghz and NVIDIA GeForce RTX2080 Super, but that was all that I could purchase at the time as all those Bitcoin miners are buying up and paying a fortune for top end hardware. I'm afraid that Imac Retina 5k 27" hardware is far too light to work with large images, especially when you start layering them. This virtual tour is one where I follow in the footsteps of the old photographers who captured HUGE Cirkut Camera panoramas. I digitise these at the best possible resolution and the images are Gigapixel sizes. 1890-2021 Metropolitan Gas Co Tower regds, Barney

Thanks for the detailed comment Waveluke! 😀 This was one of my first attempts at an extreme panorama from a tower and was captured with a 400mm lens, manually stepped a small angle to overlap the previous frame. I had some "wobblies" with vibration in two frames, but as I had to wait several weeks for suitable weather conditions, the final result will have to do!😁 The viewing distance to the city and Malvern Town Hall is about 10km and focus was sharp, but you'll notice that some distant objects are wavy, due to the intervening layers of air over 10km on a day with moderate wind. The "halos" are a problem, I was going to cut out that section but decided to leave it. With a 400mm lens it's impossible to achieve sharpness in close objects, therefore I captured some extra frames with a short lens, but seamlessly blending those in was an impossible task, hence the halos and ghosts.👻 It seems quite simple to "cut out" the close objects that have been captured with a wider lens and then paste them over as a new layer, but the reality is that I was working under pressure (the council worker standing on the level below the access ladder kept on asking "are you done yet"?). placing the short lens in exactly the same position as the long lens isn't precise, and of course the long lens had large out of focus "ghosts" around the close objects, which concealed the distant view. What we do now is to capture a long view with a long lens from a tall pole to reach above the close objects, and use a fisheye panorama of the towertop to shows the close objects.

https://www.hiddenmelbourne.com.au/melbourne-from-heidelberg-town-hall-4gpx/ is a 557,000px wide 4 Gigapixel 360degree panoramic view from the tower of Heidelberg Town hall. The file is 11.61GB in size. Photoshop can't open it. It was captured as a series of 42Mpx frames with Sony A7R2 + 400mm lens and stitched with PTGUI Pro. Final editing in Affinity then saved as a .PSB image file, before converting into a zoomable view with Pano2VR, allowing the viewer to zoom in to buildings 10km distant.

Good news! I updated Affinity to v 1.10.1.1142 and my image canvas width is 557372px! Goodbye Photoshop, Hello Affinity

Thanks for the feedback everyone! What is clear is that the specs are confusing and that the photo editors never anticipated or were designed to work with such large images and only anticipate printed formats. 532,000px printed at 120ppi would result in an image over 100m wide! With wide screens (mine is a modest 1200mm) and zoomable viewers it is nevertheless possible to immerse yourself in a very wide multi-gigapixel view and even step up to the canvas to pixel-peep (by zooming in). PTGUI Pro will stitch the 129 42Mpx image frames, blend and tone-map, but cannot do the final editing required. So, at this time, I have no choice but to stitch in PTGUI, produce two images, edit them individually, then join them again with PTGUI! I am also finding it acceptable to split the scene into four quadrants, perfect each, then join them together with a narrow black border between them.

Thanks for confirming! Yeah, I find that Affinity can't open the 532k Wide TIF file which PTGUI created. Looks like I'll just have to put it together in separate parts as I did before.

Thanks for the feedback NotMyFault! 😄 The restraint on image resolution is dictated by atmospheric conditions, ie. how many pixels per degree of the scene can be resolved. That view of Melbourne from the Heidelberg Town Hall Tower is a typical problem. I want to show the distant horizon and not a full 360x180° sphere. Photoshop is unable to handle such large pixel dimensions, no matter what image format I choose. I will do some tests on other large images and report back my results. Also with this "Time-Travel" view of Melbourne, using ca1900's large 10" x 55" Cirkut Camera prints of Melbourne, I am having to limit the resolution at which I scan the old prints and process in Photoshop. These are historic records and the old prints are degrading. I don't want to sacrifice any detail. Our State Library holds many such prints. https://www.hiddenmelbourne.com.au/time-travel/melbourne-gas-co/ I will work on these problem in Affinity and report back. Best regards Barney

I am creating very large panoramic images and am switching from Photoshop because it has severe pixel dimension limitations. This link shows an example of a 4Gpx image, 532,000 px wide, consisting of multiple image frames stitched together. https://www.hiddenmelbourne.com.au/melbourne-from-heidelberg-town-hall-4gpx/ I would like to capture and create larger images for project which shows the history of Melbourne and process them in a photo editor. The processing is necessary because objects move and the light changes in the time taken to capture the multiple frames. What are the dimensional limitations of an Affinity image? Typically, a 360x180° panorama produced from multiple frames captured by my drone is 78k x 39k px ~ 3Gpx 8.5GB Photoshop PSB format file What file format should I use and what are the maximum pixel dimensions possible Width x Height in pixels and file format x GB? My hardware is unconstrained, I can add more RAM and swap drives as required Looking forward to a solution to my problem! Barney