Help creating a macro (for 360 photos)

[Big Swifty]

I'm working with Equirectangular (2:1) images for 360 degree photos and am trying to put together a macro which would eliminate a very small transparent part of the image at the zenith (the upper most portion) that results from tilting my pano head up 10 degrees when taking the photos that are stitched together in PTGui. I know I can take a zenith and a nadir shot to eliminate these transparent areas (and sometimes I do) but I'm experimenting with a time saving workflow that can have me simply inpaint the zenith. I'm not concerned with the nadir as I'll use a nadir patch.

Here's the macro I have, which works fine with inpainting both the zenith and nadir:

Select Transparent > Grow/Shrink Selection (2 pixels) > Inpainting > Deselect.

Easy Peasy. But since the up-tilt on the pano head during shooting intentionally results in a tiny transparent area in the zenith and a larger one at the nadir, and since this transparent area at the nadir is about the size of the tripod and will be getting a nadir patch anyway, I'd prefer to eliminate the nadir from the selection process and only select the zenith. This should save processing time when running this macro on a batch with multiple images since the area at the zenith that needs inpainting is tiny and either sky or an interior ceiling, while the nadir area to be inpainted is larger and sometimes more complicated.

Are the steps I can add to this macro to deselect the lower transparent area, or any other suggestions for a macro that would accomplish this? If this isn't possible I could live with both zenith and nadir inpainting, but am also curious about an added step which applies to macros in general.

Say I didn't want to use a nadir patch; is it possible, as a last step, to Edit > Live Projection > and then use a smudge brush to smudge the inpainted nadir image resulting from the above macro? The area in need of smudging would always be in the same place, regardless of the photo being edited. Since I"m new to Affinity Photo I'm not sure if it's possible to include actions that use brush tools in a macro. I'm also not sure if macros will recognize steps added while in Live Projection mode, but I'll experiment with that.

Here's an example of the type of photograph with this issue:

 

Edited October 30, 2019 by Big Swifty

[carl123]

Try the attached macro.

It's difficult to write macros for other peoples images as you don't know the variations in size etc

This has been tested on the image you supplied and seems to work.  Try it on other images you have and if not working then supply more test images (preferably in png format so we can see the transparent areas)

The macro loads via the macro panel, not the library panel

 

zenith-inpaint.afmacro