Editing a 360 Photo

A Quick Guide for VR Pioneers

Published in

VR & AR App Development Blog — Viro Media

5 min readNov 18, 2016

Preamble: Hi, I’m Robin Har, a Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Viro Media. Viro Media is a platform for web and mobile developers to easily build VR experiences. For the past year I have been exploring design and content creation for our VR platform, and I’ve discovered some helpful tips that I will share on this blog and in our documentation to help you build your own amazing VR apps.
Note: If you haven’t yet, I recommend seeing my earlier post on How to Take Better 360 Photos before reading this guide.

You took a great 360 photo, but like any great picture, it needs to be edited before presenting to your audience. Because of its unique format, it can be difficult to edit using traditional methods. This guide will help you easily edit your 360 photos.

With this guide we will cover:

Color Adjustment
Fix the Angle
Remove the Tripod
Export

Software

Install this software before following this guide. Free trial versions are available.

Photoshop CC

The standard for all visual production and editing photos. Since I’ve been using this this software package professionally for many years, with its recent 3D spherical tools (I will cover this in a later guide), and its handshaking with Pano2VR, I highly recommend this. You can use any photo editing software for most of your edits, but Pano2VR patching tool works only with Photoshop.

Pano2VR

A great 360 photo editing and export tool. Pano2VR has some unique editing features plus a wide range of export formats. Although I don’t particularly love the the UI or the amount that it crashes, I have found the patch tool in this app to be very helpful.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to go from this…

…to this:

To follow this guide, download the example 360 photo here.

1. Color Adjustment

360 photos provide greater context and presence to any location or scene. You can maximize that experience by adjusting the overall tone and feel of the scene.

Note: the values used in this guide are specifically for this example, so the values for other 360 photos will vary.

Open cathedral_raw.jpg in Photoshop CC.

Open Filter > Camera Raw Filter…

To get a warmer palette, I chose to move the Temperature slider to +15.

To bring out more detail, move the Clarity slider to +13.

Since the photo was taken indoors with low light, we need to reduce the grain. Under the Detail tab, move the Luminance slider to 21.

Make the orange hues pop a bit more. Under the HSL / Greyscale tab, move the Orange slider to +41.

Click OK, then save the picture as a .jpg or .png, File > Export As > Export All

2. Fix the Angle

Open Pano2VR, click New Project.

Open the edited 360 picture.
Once the picture is loaded and visible in the viewport, try looking around by click-dragging.
Notice the slight tilt in the picture.

Under the Leveling:, adjust the Roll: to 3.00.

3. Remove the Tripod

Orbit the viewport camera until you’re facing down. See the tripod? Let’s remove it.

Hover over the icon in the top left of the viewport to bring up a menu of tools. Click the Bandaid icon.

Double click the tripod to bring up a patch tool. The square represents the area that will be edited. Size can be adjusted by grabbing the handles on the corners. Rotate by grabbing the center rotation icon.