Hello,

What are everyone's tips on how to do indoor spheres which when examined in photoshop or panoweaver end up being too bright from lamps, or too filled with image noise from dark floor areas?

1) How do you artificially light (if you do) your full frame fisheye shots keeping balance between the shots so there are no strange lighting lines in the stitched image?

2) How do you get rid of bleached white areas from indoor room light sources if you don't want to turn off lights? Photoshop can not add the detail that is bleached out so please don't say post burn in photoshop.

3) If you turn off all indoor lighting and just do long exposed shots
how do you escape the noise in the nikon coolpix images that
show up a lot when doing even an 8second shot ?

All other tips on indoor fisheye lighting with the coolpix 950 and up greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Dylan

dylan,

the ONLY way to handle bleaches / dark areas is to make a composite image from different exposures. you can use manual exposure settings on the 950, set aperture priority, and dial the aperture up or down to force an overexposure (to bring up the dark areas) plus an underexposure (to provide detail behind the glare). take the average exposure shot as the base, (which was shot with AE lock to maintain as much balance similarity between the 2 hemispheres as poss) and select/cut & paste relevant areas from the over/under exposed shots into the final hemis before you seam them together. typically you need an element of layer transparency, and the selected areas need feathering of at least 6 px.

flax

hey flax,

your advice is excellent but it could be time comsumming. i've been playing with Manual and Aperture to see which gives better results and faster.

if you set it to Aperture, and point to the light source that is creating the bleaching(lamps/lighbulbs in the bathroom, chandelier) and you set the Aperture to 2.6, then to 5 and 7. take all 3 pics. Then play the pics on your camera, zoom in to the light source and see which of the 3 shots produced the LESS bleaching as you call it. you will most likely by happy with one of the 3 shots - as you will see that it produces less bleaching and enough light to make the scene nice.

hey flash,

i get a broken quicktime image.