360 Virtual Tours with Flash

hey there everybody it's nathan cool with nathancoolphoto.com and in this tutorial i want to show how you can do a 360 pano for a virtual tour using flash so that you can grab some great colors also you can get window pull so you can see the views from the outside this is something i've been leading up to in the last few videos so if you haven't caught up on those yet i'd encourage you to look at those first where first i take a look at calibrating the pano head where then i take you outside show you how to do a very simple 360 panel using a dslr and then doing an all ambient interior one also which as we saw that was the last video still hands down better quality than what you'd get out of some of the best portable 360 cameras like the theta z1 now with this there's still some pros and cons obviously there is more work but this is something i do for instance for commercial properties entirely almost and then when it comes to real estate itself there are some cases where you want to do some of this you want to do some of this the theta z1 so this is where you get those money shots now today we're just inside of my kitchen and also this is the family room back here the camera that's filming me right now is in the kitchen and i'm going to be showing this 360 pan of the whole view so we've got a window view you can't see it outside here because of the exposure we're filming at we've got another view to the outside that's right over here and we're going to see that come through and we've got another one that's over the kitchen sink over that window so to get that and to get those clearer views in there that's really hard with a theta z1 or other portable camera so what we're going to be doing dslr this time though we are going to be using compared to the last few videos i am going to be using the trigger setup that includes also a flash trigger and that's going to be also syncing then with i've got an 8200 i keep this in my back pocket that's all you need we're not going to get fancy there's a whole lot of area behind me you saw that part of my house in the last video but the most important thing we're trying to do is we have to look at the principle of why we're using flash one ambient is still going to be way higher quality than what we'd get out of a portable 360 camera by doing the dslr you can still fiddle with what you need to on a dslr and still get way better quality than what you'd get out of a portable camera no matter what you use including some of these plugins that are coming forward like the the ricoh thetas you want and the other thing we're trying to do is by using flash just like i talked about my interiors book and whatnot and also by the way in the new book on virtual tour photography is that we want to be getting correct colors so by using flash and auto white balance we're going to get a frame that will give us then the basis for our colors we're going to get more accurate colors doing that method then the last thing is to be able to get the views to the outside using darkened mode window poles now if any of that sounded confusing to you this is covered in my first book on interiors i also have videos on my youtube channel look for uh videos regarding the high-end real estate photography using one light you'll see a lot of that covered in that video and of course once again in the book and also in virtual tour photography my latest book i've covered this as well and by the way in the description for this video i have a lot of pertinent links to what i'm going to be doing here including links to those books but anyways let's get started on what we'd be doing here now i'm not going to show every single detail that i did in the last two videos so i don't get redundant just concentrating on what we're trying to do here so once again i have to find my exposure setting so what i first do is i start moving my pano head around the room and looking here and start just taking some photos so i take a look at this direction here at my zero it's like what is it looking here so let's get down here i think that's probably about 15th of a second or so not too bad maybe 10th of a second all i'm doing here is looking at the histogram once again and trying to get that right of center look this is for the ambient shot that's all that we're going to do is right now our basis for using flash so i'm taking a look here and i'm settling in when i'm taking a look at these various photos 15th of a second looks pretty good it's a decent enough histogram now i can move the pano ahead around and take some other shots that was at zero position so let's go over here to 90 take another shot and that doesn't look too bad and there's the tripod and camera by the way that's filming me right now so i'm liking the histogram what i see i'm going to go around just the other directions here make sure now i'm not going to worry about the histogram like this is going to be a little bit on the dark side because it's facing into a darker room back there and then once we go around at a 270 position i can take a look at that also but i'm worried more about the exposure settings for the primary view and that's going to be this direction with the windows that's most important so that's the most important part of the scene that's going to be drawing the user's view as they navigate around they want to see the other room then you have another scene where they go into that area so don't worry about that so much the next thing though we want to be concentrating on is what we'd use for flash now we're going to use since it's really low here we're just going to use the two-stop rule that means that when we're at 15th of a second go up six clicks on your dial one two three four five six that takes us to one sixtieth of a second that's enough to where we'll use a pop of flash and that will then be our flash basis layer when we do the flash ambient blending that'll be far enough it'll get enough of the ambient out there we don't need to eliminate all of it we're once again just trying to dominate the white balance with using a flash to get the correct colors but the tricky part now comes in what do we do for a window pole so without using any flash just start playing with your exposure i know for a fact this is probably yeah and it is about 1 160th of a second looking outside once again though just like in my last couple videos for the last video i should say four interiors uh using a 360 dslr it's a iso 320 f 7.1 so that looks pretty good your settings may change depending on the scene that you're shooting so now we know our exposure settings we can start incorporating flash but the first thing we want to do is optimize the composition so since there are three windows i don't want to face my camera straight at one because i know what's going to happen i'm going to start having overlapping windows so what i try to do is position myself so that the first scene that i'm looking at has the most windows in it that way when i turn to 90 degrees i don't have to do another window pull for those areas you don't want to have a lot of overlapping window pulls you can get stitching errors from that and it just makes a lot more work also on what you have to do so anyways i'm positioned that way so i can see this window that's out here in the living room that you can see on film here and also then the one that's straight in front of me so let's get started with that once again like i show in the last one i do my crazy little funky take two this is where i'm gonna start my footage so i'll go take two boom okay boom now we're gonna start shooting so 15th of a second ambient that's good we decided on 1 60th of a second for my flash so i'm going to take it up to 160th of a second the trigger in the hot shoe stays on the whole time don't worry about the power there everything's just by this guy turn the flash on because you have it off when you don't need to use it that's just the difference here when you compare using other interior photography so i'm going to take this 8200 up to about half now what you do to flash in here just aim it back a little bit because all that you want you don't want to get a lot in the uh the the rim of the fisheye lens you want just enough so you start getting color don't worry if it's a little overexposed a little under your after color that's the main thing you'll see why when we get to post processing now for the window pole we go up then to what we decided on which was 1 160th of a second and i know i'll probably have to dial that down a lot i'm going to try to get both of them at one time and if not then i'll just grab a couple more and i just flash some of these off sometimes i flash the power and then i turn the flash off and then i take my repair shot okay good we're done now we move on to the next scene so let's do this again i'm going to go ahead and move over here to 90 degrees i'm going to set myself down to our ambient shot 1 15 of a second that looks good now we're going to go ahead and incorporate our flash that's once again 1 60 of a second using that two-stop rule turn on the flash turn it up a little bit compared to the window pull aim it behind my head and boom so that should add enough color and it does now let's go to the window pull setting we decided on which was 1 160th of a second and hit our window pull that looks good a little bit hot on that window we'll do it again and it's not a problem you can do a bunch of these fire off you're not going to run out of film or anything okay and then of course of course my repair shot okay let's move on to the next one that was 90 degrees we now move to our 180 position this is easy because i don't have any windows i have to worry about so we're just going to take our ambient and then we're going to go ahead and shoot our flash shot at 1 60th of a second turn the flash on make sure the flash powers up a little bit aim it behind me somewhere and good i've got some color going in there that's good shut the flash off let's go to the 270 position and now that we're at 270 we're going to do the same thing i'm going to set this to uh 15th of a second take the ambient shot let me step away from that guy and still be in camera here and then we'll go to 60th of a second which is then our flash exposure and turn the flash on aim it behind me someplace and good now we've got some color maybe even turn that up just a little bit good okay that looks good now these aren't the best looking flash shots but you don't have to worry about it you'll see why in post-processing this is just to get our color okay now i'm gonna move myself back to zero position and shoot the zenith so take this guy point him straight up just like i've shown in the other videos and then we take ourselves down to our 15th of a second duck out of the way because everything shows up in the fisheye boom and then we go up to our flash exposure now here's the tricky part what do you do to get the flash up to the ceiling don't worry about it much the the the zenith nobody really looks at it much anyways but what i do is you can just flash around on the floor so i'll just take this flash power down a little bit and i'll start flashing on the walls floors different things i just kind of do that i get a few of them and make sure that something looks yeah halfway is decent now there's going to be little rims of the windows in here there's not much in this case but just to be on the safe side this is what i do i set our flash exposure the exposure for the flash shot for the window pull i should say it won 1 60 of a second and then i just go into the windows in question get myself out of the way and go boom boom boom take a repair shot and we're done and that's it now that's a lot of footage to work with for a 360 pano but the results are something that's going to be a lot different than what you have if you just had used for instance insta 360 1x which definitely is on a poor site for quality a ricoh theta z1 which can be fairly good quality but to get views you just can't get it now for this type of house i would still probably want to get a view i'm not on the water or anything it's not a million dollar house but it's i would still like to get those views now it's up to the client if they want to do it and pay for the extra work now comes in the easier part though i'm going to show how we put this together in post-processing and you may find that this is faster than trying to get the same type of results with footage that you would get from the ricoh theta z1 which by the way you could do some with luminosity masking that's a few videos ago but right now let's take this footage go upstairs do the post processing so that we get one full 360 pano virtual tour with flash and the whole shebang with the window poles ready to see how this is done let's head upstairs and start post processing all right so we've got our footage here and by the way once we're done post processing this i'll recap on a few important things to remember when doing some of these 360s with the dslr so stay tuned for that near the end of the video anyways we can see this is where i finally did our hey there's our take two and all this test footage before it anyways i've imported these all into lightroom this would be our first photo that we're going to work with now for all these i applied that 360 import preset that i show in the book and basically that's just taking the sharpening out so what we want to do now is we have this one we like that we take a look at the flash shot that's this guy here not too bad okay it's a i don't really care so much about the exposure even though that does look uh fairly well up on the histogram but what i'm after now is just did i get the right colors and obviously we've got way better colors than what we had off of our ambient only shot once again this was auto just using auto white balance typical for any other interior or real estate photography now we want our window poles so you know i shot a bunch of them and we take a look here yeah there's that one it might be a little bit blown out over here when we go to post process it so near the end i got some that were probably a little bit better but what we'll do for this example let's just go ahead and use this one it kind of covers a lot maybe this one here would be best but we'll use this one and let's say maybe this one here does fairly well on that window that pretty much covers it all so well let's just use these and then i can also bring in the repair layer if i need to to get a better fix on it so let's go ahead and use this particular one it's the first one i shot and once again like on any other window poles for repair layer look at the white balance make it the same this is 4954 over here so we're going to do the same thing and we're going to go 49.54 so now we've got a repair layer that matches our darken mode window pole which is there so we grab all four of these it's just like doing anything else in the interior real estate photography we're going to open these as layers in photoshop so that'll load up now this is where the processing varies a little bit compared to using the standard flash ambient blend that you might be used to using for interior photography like i talked about in the interiors book and other videos throughout my channel so what we're going to do is i have an action that does this it makes a lot quicker but to go through the steps that make up the action what i'm going to do is turn this into luminosity mode okay that's great now i've got the correct colors but it's way too much luminosity so i'm just going to change the opacity in this case i'm going to change the opacity down to 70 you can see it here i did it with just keystrokes i can finally get something that looks good like let's say 60 that's pretty even mix and what you can do too is just by if you go escape v and then start hitting one of the numbers escape gets you out of the layers make sure you're and hitting v makes the hits the move tool so you're not using a brush then when you hit a number you're just changing you can see it changing over there on the opacity i'm just changing the uh the level of opacity so you can go it's like okay it's 100 opacity that's 60 that's not enough there's 70 whatever finally okay 60 that's where i like it now the darken mode window pull so we take our wood like anything else take our window pull up to the top turn it into darken mode went way down too far dark in mode why am i fine okay now we've got that that looks good layer mask hide let's zoom in here and we will first do the easy window and i'm just going to cut a polygon around it this is just one of the fast easy ways to do it i've shown in other videos reverse my colors hit the delete key boom there's our view outside we'll do the same thing over here for the big window okay just draw a polygon real rough around it don't worry about the overlap that's the beauty of darken mode window poles boom there's our window pull now do i need to do something here on the repair let's bring this guy all the way up to the top yeah i probably should so let's just hide that layer mask and this is where i've shown this in the window pull video where you don't have to get exact because all we're going to do is tap in some of this so just get some stuff around here that's fine and then you can just then brush in just a little bit here you're going to make sure that you don't hit anything else so that's it just to get a little bit more in there now i could spend a lot more time get a lot better window pull with some of the flashing that i was doing make sure i don't get a line here and that's just all the standard repair stuff that you would do for a darkened mode window pull now that isn't the crystal clear darken mode window pole that you might want to get out of something like that and that would just be a matter that of changing the exposure settings when you were doing the flash once again though this is going to be just miles different you can already see what a difference it has on getting the nice edge around the windows we don't have that any strange looking stuff like you would out of using a portable camera using a dslr okay so anyways long story short you do the same processing but you don't paint it in it's an all or nothing thing when it comes to the ambient the ambient layer does not have a mask you just change its opacity then you just flatten that save it and now it's back into lightroom do not do any post processing just export this as a tip so we're going to go file export and we're going to export this as a tiff and we'll give it a custom name and we'll go we'll just call it 01-01 it's our first one and the first one out of there okay i'm going to make sure that it goes out as a tiff srgb 16-bit i want all metadata to be included that's going to be very important when we get to pt gui and then post processing do nothing you know that if you're using the ricoh that's when we go down here and select that but here we're going to do nothing so we just export that out now we're done with that particular one now we move and we just do the same thing to the other uh four images the other three around one up so there's our ambient there's our flash right there and then we've got a window pole that looked pretty good here so we do the same thing all p e o o by the way on windows we'll open those as layers in photoshop makes this a pretty quick work of it and i'm gonna go ahead and use my action which does the exact same thing which will change then this ambient layer into luminosity mode it'll start it at a 50 percent opacity yeah but we decided on the other one that we were at 60 right that we liked so you want to make sure you do the same thing if you forget keep those files open before you flatten go back to your history and see what it was you can go back to them and there you go ah yeah the opacity was 60. good that's why i keep these open by the way okay so that looks good we're going to take our darken mode window pull up to the top change its mode to darken go in here real quick zoom in and then layer mask hide we can brush it in use a polygon whatever we want to do we'll just use a polygon real quick that will probably work just fine reverse our colors hit delete reverse them back boom there's our darken mode window pull bueno all right layer flatten save it goes back over to lightroom and once again file export and this will be 01-2 it's our second one in the rotation that's good now we move on to number three which is easier as you recall because this one didn't have any need for the window pole there were no windows so all we have is just the ambient and a flash all p-e-o-o open those as layers in photoshop we do our quick flash ambient blending once again all global it's going to be 60 opacity so we'll just do that with my action which once again luminosity mode starts at 50 we'll change that to 60 opacity layer flatten save it now we go back over to lightroom and now we export that out file export okay and we'll call this one 01-3 now once again like i said it is dark in this other section of the room and to me that doesn't bother me so much for this type of pano because if you really wanted to light up that whole area yeah you might have used more ambient yeah you might have used more flash but you're really going to have when this goes into a virtual tour an arrow that takes somebody in there if they want to see it let them see it we're going to be concentrating on the room for this scene that we're in that's the one that we're concentrating on the light anyways moving on then this was our 270 position by the way did we export that out there just to make sure here i will take a look at what i exported and we did one two and three okay sorry about that folks i was just losing my spot there for a second as i was rambling on too much there's our ambient shot here was a flash shot that turned out very well and of course though me i've got my hand sticking over here i'd repair that if i wanted to later in post i'm not worried about it for the example take these both as layers in photoshop all p-e-o-o once again comes up in photoshop and it's once again if you have actions that does that do this it makes it so much quicker like for instance all i'd be doing here is this boom that guy's done and that had that ambient and luminosity mode and changed the opacity of 60 it's just an action you make your photoshop actions do this very simple by the way search for 5050 flambeet on my youtube channel you'll find videos related to that so we'll layer flatten that we'll save it goes back over here to lightroom file export and then this will be 104. okay that's good now we're going to the zenith so we've got our ambient shot and sure enough here's those overlapping windows around the rim so that's why we had to do those window pulls now we can try to pick out a flash shot and this flash shot yeah it's really bright it'll work it just doesn't matter so we'll take this that and then we'll grab the window poles which happen to be down here there was that one for that window and then there should be another one for the other window is that one there actually that'll do good for both it caught both of them so we'll use this one we'll use this for our flash our ambient alt-p-e-o-o boom bring those up so once again the same thing we're going to turn that ambient layer into luminosity mode set its opacity to 60 and then just put in the darken mode window pull so we do that real quick that ambient layer is now luminosity mode 60 opacity we take our window pull layer take him up to the top turn him into darken mode layer mask hide and then we just put in our window pulls now i've got some stuff on the ceiling here that doesn't look right because of flash i could fix it in post we'll just see how it looks then deal with that later not a big deal okay once again people are looking at the ceilings let them if they see some shadows who cares they're trying to buy real estate if this is a commercial job there's a lot more work that goes into it this is just more luxury property this is completely acceptable so layer flatten save it good now we are back over here in lightroom and just file export that out that'll be 01-5 okay now what we have if i go over here to view nxi and that's just as you know what i use to view a lot of these on the uh the computer here and to deal with them for dragon it's because i use nikon but um and it's their software but now i can see all of them here now all i have to do is drag those into pt gui so i got pt gui here take all five of these images and in pt gui's project assistant just like i've shown on the last two videos just drag them in there and we're going to do the three-step process the next thing is align images and it shows boom our nice beautiful looking pano with those window poles and we can close this window out and save this so let's create the panorama once again it's going to be a tiff file so we just create panorama that's now saving that file and it will be big these are very high definition by the way so when we do save them as jpegs by the way sometimes i will save them at a quality of 10 out of photoshop because the maximum quality of 12 is a lot so this has taken just a little while to do but it will come up here shortly and by the way if you save these then as photoshop files later that's also a lot of room so this is why you don't do an entire house with like let's say 15 scenes with all of these unless somebody's really going to pay you for it i talk about the pricing for that by the way in the book as well all right so now let's go back over here i like to keep all these open just in case i need to go back and change something but now what we have is this other tiff it's really big view nxi doesn't show it because of it we'll drag it up here as a new image we can open okay and that looks good now one thing we did is you know when i do the import for any 360 there's no sharpening yet so everything looks very soft okay so now comes the part where we apply a preset like we would in lightroom duplicate the layer i like to go ctrl j then we'll go up to filter camera raw filter and in camera raw filter then i have these various presets now i've got one that i like to use which is light bump sharp no verticals so that will apply sharpening a bunch of stuff you can go over here and see what it did um it didn't change the exposure add some contrast got a nice looking histogram up here maybe i'll bring in a little bit of the highlights or keep them down a little bit so that looks good i can zoom in here the window pull doesn't look bad and of course you can tell which side has the screen and which doesn't on this maybe lower the blacks a little bit whatever adjustments i want to do that's completely fine then i just click okay okay so that's looking good so this now if we zoom in here now we can start seeing that and we'll view it a hundred percent go over here to uh this area like the trash can why not you can see that that added some sharpening got some more a on this towel but i really don't care about that so anyways this is looking good as we go back and forth nice and sharp great colors i'll add a quick nader patch and a deer however you want to say it and you've seen me do this before lots of alternatives i'll show a couple in the book we'll just go to layer new layer and then i will use the default colors using the paint bucket tool and then i will just resize that down to where it covers that nader right there or in a deer okay now all we have to do is layer flatten that and then we want to save this as a jpeg so we'll save that as a jpeg and we'll call this living stuff dot jpeg and i don't want this at the highest quality there's no need to it will be crazy big when we upload it to cloud panel which has limits marzipan are the same way so let's take that down to 10. so once that's saved and once we put that out there on mars a pano or we put it out there on cloud panel the final product will look like this now an important step you can't forget on doing these 360 panels with a dslr is that you want to be able to save your history on what you're doing by adding contrast and sharpening and things like that when that panel wraps around you might get a stitching error so it's good to say that if you do get a stitching error on that layer that we then post process remember we duplicated that layer put a mask on it just erase it off the edges i'll show another video on that coming up perhaps at another time the other thing too to remember is that yeah these are large tiff files and the other is a lot of work that goes into it so you have to price yourself accordingly this isn't going to be for every single job but when you have some of these that you can show a client you can give them options for instance one of the things that i offer is you want just a basic simple 360 ricoh theta z1 that's simple that's fine i'm in and out and the post processing just kind of is what it is with some luminosity masking but if you really have a luxury property you have water views you have a good view you want outside you really want to showcase this then perhaps five scenes of the money shots doing the dslr then take the ricoh theta z1 or some other portable camera around the property get the rest and then offer like you would for commercial properties to do it all perhaps charging by the hour or have something that's commensurate to that based on your level of effort for doing this but once again the level of effort is different here it might have looked like a lot of work but when you do luminosity masking from a portable camera you're not going to get nearly the same results and it can take a lot longer to really mess around with it so there's kind of a trade-off for some of this and get some practice under your belt see how this goes for you and then you can see how this would work for yourself once again a lot of this is covered in the new book link to that down in the description for this video upcoming videos will be showing things about what lenses should i be using how should i be pricing this what can i do for structuring this and a few other tips along the way plus regular stuff for real estate photography like i have been covering but i've tried to put an emphasis on this because virtual tours have taken off so big since the outbreak of the pandemic anyways i hope this video is useful for you and you can use some of this in your photography as well if you did like this video you can subscribe to my youtube channel it won't cost you anything and as soon as one of these videos is posted you'll be the first to know thanks a lot for watching until next time take care be safe and get out there and shoot something

Channel: Nathan Cool Photo

Views: 15,711

Rating: 4.9072847 out of 5

Keywords: virtual tour, 360 photography, real estate

Id: 4hZRlPyMyd4

Length: 29min 37sec (1777 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 14 2020