How to take better 360 photos? Guide part 4

In the previous part of our tutorial, you could see how to process 360 photos in Adobe Lightroom to get a professional effect and obtain high quality. We also showed you how you can quickly stitch them with the Ricoh Theta Stitcher to get a virtual tour ready version. After these few steps, the photos are much better, but there are two more issues that we can take care of in order to enjoy even more attractive spherical photos. The steps we will discuss in this article are: removing a tripod from a 360 photo and removing noises.

How to remove a tripod from a 360 photo?

The thing about 360 photos is that they will capture everything around you. Unfortunately, side -effect is that the tripod, and often the reflection of the 360 ​​camera in the mirror will also appear in the photosphere. This often disrupts the reception of the photographed room and distances us from the professional effect.

A quick way to remove a tripod from a 360 photo

One of the easiest ways is to simply cover the tripod visible on the floor with your company logo (in the Evryplace editor, just use the graphic widget and position it nicely on the floor). It is a very quick solution, which also allows us to brand our office.

However, with more 360 ​​photos it can become overwhelming – e.g. if in one large room there are numerous logos on the floor (the same applies to the logo in each room). Such a virtual tour may make it difficult for viewers to perceive the space properly, and even discourage them from purchasing (e.g. it will be more difficult for them to visualize the rooms as potentially their own). Therefore, we recommend that you only use this method sporadically.

Advanced way to remove a tripod from a 360 photo

In order to remove the tripod and the camera’s reflections in mirrors / glass / other reflective surfaces, we can use Adobe Photoshop. To do this, open the photosphere in Adobe Photoshop and then create a 3d Sphere from it. This way, when the tripod is removed, the stitching line of the photosphere will not be visible because Photoshop will know that the pixels on the lower edge of the image will be adjacent and apply the processing taking this into account.

➡ Now we reach for the Healing Brush tool.

We mark the tripod and other elements that we want to remove.

(Hint: right-clicking will open the properties of the “brush” which selects the elements to be removed. We recommend setting the appropriate size, a little larger than the tripod, and the “hardness” at about 50%)

And it’s ready 👏:

Now it suffices to export the 3D sphere:

How to remove noises from a 360 photo?

Topaz DeNoise AI (note: the program is paid, but definitely worth using in our opinion) will help you quickly remove noise that is characteristic for 360 cameras. Settings that we need to pay attention to when removing noises are AI Mode: AI Clear and Settings: Remove Noise set to High and Enhance Sharpness set to High.

And it’s done, in the folder we choose we have professional quality photos that we can directly upload to Evryplace and create an amazing, much higher quality than using the jpg format and automatic settings, virtual tour. The noise reduction gives us a very attractive end result.

Summary of the guide on how to take (better) 360 photos

Pictures taken according to the steps given by us maintain sharpness, the balance between light and shadow and colours much better. By taking the steps listed in the guide, we avoid “flooding with light” and dark invisible places. The surfaces viewed will now be attractive, bright, clear and very aesthetic. Thanks to this, your clients will react much better to the presentation – as you know, “we eat with our eyes” and what is more visually attractive wins in the fight for our attention, because it evokes more positive emotions and stays in our memory for a longer time.

So remember about the DFE plugin on your 360 camera, photo processing in Lightroom, as well as noise removal and removing a tripod from your photospheres. The first time to take all these steps into account, will be time consuming, but with each subsequent attempt you will reach a point when it will be a matter of minutes.

We hope you find our series of articles helpful. We wish you good luck in using the potential of your photospheres and virtual tours in building the potential of your company! 🙂