360 HDR Pano showing a join :-(

[Keith Robertson]

I stitched a 360 panorama today and outputted a 32bit .exr file from PTGui.

 

I tried to process this in Affinity Photo's HDR persona to tone map the final image. Unfortunately the tone mapped tiff has a visible join in it. You can see this in the screenshot taken when the tiff was in Pano2VR.

 

So I've had to go back to my old workflow using Photomatix Pro which has an option to eliminate this join when tone mapping from the 32 bit file to the LDR tiff.

 

Is there a workaround for this in Affinity Photo?

 

Thanks,

 

 

[Keith Robertson]

Any responses from Affinity?

 

I can edit the LDR equirectangular image anytime in Affinity Photo with no issues. This is great for fixing small errors, a little easier than using patches in Pano2VR, great. This updates the file in Pano2VR so fits in perfectly with my workflow. 

 

But the seam / join is always there if I try and tone map the 32 bit exr equirectangular image with Affinity Photo, forcing me to use Photomatix instead. So a fix or some background info would be very much appreciated, thanks  :D

 

 

BTW:

 

I've also setup my Mac to open .psd files directly in Affinity Photo now and configured the round trip option as well. This means Affinity Photo opens the Pano2VR patches (with can only be .psd files at the moment) directly and saves them too. So goodbye Photoshop, hooray! 

 

Adding a vector based logo at the bottom of the pano with a Pano2VR .psd patch is still editable once added and saved by Affinity Photo too. 

 

Some examples here: http://www.fachwen.org/panos/170120-fachwen/     http://www.fachwen.org/panos/170419-bigil/

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Any responses from Affinity?

 

I can edit the LDR equirectangular image anytime in Affinity Photo with no issues. This is great for fixing small errors, a little easier than using patches in Pano2VR, great. This updates the file in Pano2VR so fits in perfectly with my workflow. 

 

But the seam / join is always there if I try and tone map the 32 bit exr equirectangular image with Affinity Photo, forcing me to use Photomatix instead. So a fix or some background info would be very much appreciated, thanks  :D

 

 

BTW:

 

I've also setup my Mac to open .psd files directly in Affinity Photo now and configured the round trip option as well. This means Affinity Photo opens the Pano2VR patches (with can only be .psd files at the moment) directly and saves them too. So goodbye Photoshop, hooray! 

 

Adding a vector based logo at the bottom of the pano with a Pano2VR .psd patch is still editable once added and saved by Affinity Photo too. 

 

A little example here: http://www.fachwen.org/panos/170120-fachwen/

Hi Keith,

 

I assume that the seam in the 360-degree VR pano is where the left/right boundary of the equirectangular source image meets?

 

Since the Tonemapping persona applies potentially strong exposure, contrast, and brightness adjustments to the image, it would have to have a 360-degree toggle to make sure that the left/right edges of the image get the same adjustments. That would certainly be a useful feature addition, something to request in that forum.

 

The only way to avoid such seams with the current toolset, is to either do the tonemapping on the tiles before stitching, or as a workaround produce an equirectangular+ image, which has an additional image column (a duplicate of the left or right edge added to the other edge). That would produce an image that has a width of more than twice the heigth (i.e. more than 360 degrees x 180 degrees), so after tonemapping, you'd have to crop its width. The additional replicated column at the left or right can be a part of the stitching (just duplicate and rename one column of images and add them to the stitching operation) or a temporary copy/paste from the existing EXR equirectangular image before Tonemapping. The latter is probably faster since it avoids having to create control points in the stitcher (although PTGUI would have no problems with that since the images are then identical duplicates).

 

Cheers,

Bart

[Keith Robertson]

Thanks Bart, yes, I've used a workaround like you suggested in the past. I guess what we need is a 360-degree toggle in Affinity at some point.

 

Though, this morning, I've been brushing up on Photomatix and there seem to be lots of free presets available on-line these days, some of which do quite a good job of tone-mapping in different styles that are useful. Some presets like this in Affinity would be good too  :)

[HenryLanghorn]

I'm having this issue as well - surely the edge of the photo is irrelevant - pixels at each edge of the photo should be treated in a fairly similar fashion as they are closely related in that there's no seam in pre tone mapped image. It's a shame as this is really messing up my workflow.

[Orxion]

hi, any news to this problem? the topic has been created in 2017, and so far I see no solution and I am myself having this problem .. any tips, pls? thx

 

and just to make sure .. I am looking for solution, not a workaround .. 

[Detlev Freihoff]

The edge that appears in the panorama after HDR processing in Affinity seems understandable to me. Affinity does not "know" that this is a panorama. In HDR tone mapping, various automatisms run to copy the layers into each other. Then the content of the left edge may well be a little different from that of the right edge. And then it no longer fits.

The solution is to switch off the automatic tone mapping. In the opening dialogue where you import the exposure layers, at the very bottom is "Assign colour/tone values for HDR image". There you have to remove the tick. You can edit the resulting image with many parameters via the "Develop Persona". This applies to the entire image and thus avoids nuance differences at the stitch edges.

[ABSOLUTE Drone]

Hi,

Still no option to apply a tone mapping on a 360° panorama, it's a shame to have to use another software for that.

Nicolas.

[James Ritson]

Hi @ABSOLUTE Drone and others in the thread, I've developed some non-destructive tone mapping macros that may help here: they're spatially invariant so are very useful for HDRIs/360 HDR imagery. You just apply the macro and it adds a new group, you can go in and set the base exposure/white balance among other things.

They're available for free (just put "0" into the Gumroad "I want this" box) from here: https://jamesritson.co.uk/resources.html#hdr

It may also be worth having a look at the Blender Filmic macros, available directly underneath the HDR tone mapping macros. They effectively do the same thing but are designed to emulate the Filmic transforms within Blender, so you have different contrast options. Hope that helps!

Video tutorial here, at 11:38 in the video you'll see the 360 seam-aware tone mapping: