By Ken Wilson
360 photography is a branch of photography that seems to be very popular lately, with many photographers (professional or not) being interested in it. Making a 360 virtual tour is not very difficult, but whether or not is a good one depends on little details such as the camera that is used and the stitching software. For anyone who doesn’t know photography, making a 360 virtual tour seems almost impossible.
Watching a 360 tour can be breath taking, but making it is, for most of us, a puzzle. Photographers would strongly disagree – the technique is simple, and the stitching part is easy. The tricky part, in their opinion, is finding the right subject for a 360 virtual tour. In just a few words, 360 photography works like that: you need a tripod, a camera and a stitching application. You take several photos, making sure each time you move your camera with let’s say 50%. Once you got all your shots you stitch the images and there you have it – your very own 360 virtual tour.
Someone who is just starting to be interested in photography is probably puzzled about all the choices he or she has to make – from camera to tripods and from photo paper to the printer. When it comes to panoramic photography, professional photographers have different views on one thing: the stitching software. This is the application that allows anyone to actually stitch two or more pictures together. There are many such applications out there, and it is up to every photographer to choose the software he or she thinks is best.
360 photography stitching applications can easily be found: they can be purchased on line or in stores or they can be downloaded for free from the internet. During the last few years camera producers have included such applications in their camera kits, so basically anyone can make a 360 virtual tour. But please have in mind that all these applications do not have the same quality, and there may be features that are not available with all applications.
Probably the most frequently used stitching applications are Photoshop, Google Picasa and AutoStitch. As well as that you can also stitch images in Flash but some say that the image may come out distorted. It is also said that one of the best image stitching software is the Panasonic Lumix. It comes with all Panasonic Digital cameras and it is called Panorama Maker. It is available for both Windows and OS, making it a panoramic photography tool for virtual anybody.
Usually all 360 virtual tour programs come with a sample set of photos on which to experiment. With some of the programs you will have to select the whole set of photos. They are then opened simultaneously and put together and the finished photo is automatically saved. You may even find such applications to open your picture viewer to show you the result. With certain applications you can even get an image where you look 360 degrees around a room by moving the mouse left or right, and you think you are actually in the room looking around.
There has been an increase in the demand of 360 virtual tours lately; as a result of that there is an increase in the number of people who are interested in 360 virtual tours as well. Being successful in this type of photography greatly depends on the stitching program.
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