I want to continue on a virtual tour blog I did earlier.  I spoke about using a telephoto lens, mounting it on your landscape adaptor on your tripod.  Making sure it is level, you allow the horizontal lock to be free.  From experience, you take the number of stills that will cover the scene you wish to take, being sure to overlap well with each still.

Now you will have to manually stitch these stills.  PanaVue Image Assembler Photo Stitching Software  came with your virtual tour software package from RTV and is not difficult to use at all. I use three flags to stitch. When you are done, you will have your beautiful scene in telephoto and a pano.

Another trick that I use to gain that professional look is to use Exposure Fusion to enhance the pano. But you need more than one of the scenes that is over/under exposed or both is best.  You can create this by using one of your photo shop softwares. Take the original virtual tour pano, enhance it with the ‘brightness’ control saving one as ‘dark’ and one as ‘light’. How much brighter and how much lighter, I will leave that up to you to experiment with. Using Photo studio 6, I simply move the glider all the way to the left for dark and all the way right for lighter.  Now you have three for the exposure fusion engine to process.    Lastly you will need to size this massive file down to 800 kb. And then add it to your tour by simply using the ADD button and making sure you click the button, full 360 Pano.  You will WOW your virtual tour clients with this technique.

I’ve attached the two scenes. Which one do you think has been enfused?

James Hoback