SPHERICAL TO CUBIC TO SPHERICAL CONVERSION Back to software index I made these two small filters for Photoshop to ease the retouching of spherical/equirectangular panoramas. The filters will map the zenith and nadir (top and bottom) of the panorama to flat planes so that they are easily edited, you can then map the retouched parts back to spherical/equirectangular again to apply the edits to your original panorama. The filters can be downloaded at the bottom of this page. Recommended usage: Here's a brief description on how I recommend you use the filters. First let me tell you a little bit about how I photograph my panoramas. I shoot my panoramas using a full frame Canon camera, with a Sigma 8mm fisheye lens. They are put on top of a Manfrotto 300N pano head, which has a neat click-stop angle snap. To save time and weight, I don't use a full 360x180 pano head. I just shoot three angles, with 120 degrees between them. When I return to my computer I compile the images using either PTGui or Autopano Pro. If you look at the image below, you can see a typical panorama from my setup. As you might see, there's missing pieces at the top of the panorama (a black bar), and there's a tripod covering the bottom edge of the pano. Those are the parts my filter will help you remove :) What we need to do first is to duplicate the pano image onto a new layer. We will work on a copy of the image, and not do anything that could degrade our precious panorama. With this duplicate layer selected, go to the filter menu and select the '1: Sphere to Cubic...' filter from the 'Superrune' category. For easier workflow, I have numbered the plugins. So the 1: plugins are the one you run first, followed by the 2:s. There's also a filter called '1: Sphere to Cubic Express...' which will use use your saved settings and apply the filter without any input. This version of the plugin is perfect for doing a conversion inside a Photoshop action. This is the filter window. There are a couple of options inside the window that you should play around with. You can choose to only extract the top or the bottom of your panorama. There are also settings for the projection angle and for spinning/rotating the projection itself. You can also change the interpolation type if you want. Hold down shift while you move the sliders, and you can see the preview update as you make adjustments. We will go with the defaults for now, press the 'Reset' button to make sure you are using the default settings. Click 'OK' and the filter will start working. Here's the result of the filter, with the zenith (top) and nadir (bottom) of your panorama nicely mapped out for you. We will do our retouching on a new layer, so create a blank layer. Now use all your Photoshop magic and tricks to cover the holes in your panorama. You can even use photos of the zenith and nadir and paste them into your layer. I just use the clone and healing brush tools to edit my panoramas. Remember to set the clone tool to 'Sample All Layers' from the options at the top of the screen. Above is the result of my Photoshop work. For the bottom part, I used a clone brush to remove the tripod legs, and then I wiped away the center piece of the tripod with a healing brush. For the roof, I just used the eyedropper to pick a surrounding colour and simply painted away the offending hole. If you had time on location, you will of course have photos of the Zenith and Nadir. To save time I just skip them and edit my panos "in post". But you can of course just paste your photos into the layers instead of painting like I did. Now we will take our working layer and convert it back to the original panorama mapping. Make sure the layer is selected, and select the '2: Cubic to Spheric...' filter from the 'Superrune' category. There are a couple of options here as well. These options are the same as the previous conversion, and the filter will start by loading your previous settings. If they are not the same the remapped layer won't match your panorama. There is also a blend slider here to fade out your painted layer. Again, we'll leave everything at their defaults. Press OK, and the zenith/nadir is converted back to their original spherical mapping. Now hide or delete the duplicate layer, you don't need it anymore. If you turn on and off the paint layer, you can see the areas where you have fixed the panorama. As you can see, only areas where you have painted will be updated - the rest is unchanged. That way most of the original panorama is kept, ensuring you don't degrade your pixels by converting back and forth. Do some final edits if you like, then you can just merge all the layers into a single image. And you are done! Next panorama, please! Download and installation Just unzip the filters to your Photoshop plug-in folder, usually at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop\Plug-ins\. The filters will appear in the filter menu under the "SuperRune" category. The filters are Windows only, sorry about that. They are programmed through the Filter Meister filter development kit, which does not support OSX at this time. Click here to download the filters as a single zip file. If you find the filters useful, please consider a small PayPal donation to support further development and other filters. Changelog and small writing July 19 2007, Version 1.1: - The filters will save their settings to a file called spherecubic.ini, to make sure the settings are remembered. The settings file will be saved in the same folder as the plugins. - Added options to only extract Zenith or Nadir. - Added options to rotate/spin the projection. This is very handy if you want to line up floor boards or other linear patterns. - Added 'Express' versions of the filters for quick conversions without any options. These are ideal if you want to use the filters inside Photoshop actions. July 10 2007, Version 1.0.1: - Projection is adjusted through an angle slider, instead of plane distance. This is more logical for non-3D users. Thanks to my brother Ruben for helping me out with the math on that one :) - Sphere to Cubic progress bar counts up once and not twice. July 8 2007, Version 1.0: - First public version. Known issues: - The plugins don't work with float images. I will be able to support float as soon as FilterMeister does. - Running the plugins eat a lot of memory, about three times as much as the images themselves. On my 3Gb machine I hit the roof at 10000 pixel float images. Other users with 2Gb of RAM have been able to convert maximum 6000 pixel images. I am looking into this, but since there's little memory managment I can do I'm afraid that this also is a limitation of FilterMeister. - The plugins will not work on multiple layers. This is a Photoshop limitation. Disclaimer: These filters are provided as-is, no responsibility will be held for the loss of files and system data while working with these filters. The filters should not be resold or redistributed in any way. Thanks to the creators of FilterMeister for creating this wonderful tool, and thanks to everybody on the FilterMeister support forum. All the images on this website are (c) copyrighted Rune Spaans and their respective owners. Any use of the materials on this site other than for private, non-commercial viewing purposes is strictly prohibited. If you want to use some of these images for promotional or editorial reasons, please contact me.