360x180° Panorama Tutorial - Pt.5: Editing the Nadir

Hello and welcome to the last part of my little panoramic photography tutorial series.
This is part 5. My name's Florian and I run the website Pano.ie — as always,
you're very welcome to visit it.
As you see, I have no shame plugging this website ;-) Anyway.
There are basically two ways to do what we want to do today. Well, there are more than two
but I'm going to show you two. What we want to do is extract the floor image of the panorama,
edit that (to remove flares or — if you have the tripod still in it — to remove the tripod)
and then insert it back into our original panorama.
If you don't have "KRPano Tools",
you can do this with PTGui and the free templates that Erik Krause has provided.
So if you go to Erik's home page, go to
"Tips, Tools & Techniques", and at the very bottom
you'll find the PTGui templates and this one in particular:
"Extract & insert floor image from an equirectangular panorama".
So you download the file, and then you are just going to place it
into your Library folder. Just look at the PTGui home page where to put those files
so that it can find them.
Once we've installed those two files, let's open PTGui,
drop the full panorama that we've created in the third tutorial
(ignore this dialog, PTGui doesn't know what camera/lens this has been shot with because
there's no more EXIF information about the camera in the file . . . )
so we're gonna ignore this dialog and all we do is apply the template "Extract floor".
That's going to set it up so that the image, when exported, will just give you the
vertical down direction. So all you need to do is just apply that file,
go to "Set optimum size" => "Maximum size",
set your interpolator (I'm just going to use the fast transform here, for the sake of speed . . .)
and then click "Create panorama".
That's now going to extract the floor image
and you'll have it there.
This is the exact vertical down perspective.
There's another way of getting to this point
by using the "KRPano Tools". Simply go into the KRPano Tools folder, you'll find
a droplet which is called "Convert SPHERE to CUBE".
So I'll just drop my file on this,
it's going to open a terminal and it's going to extract
6 cube faces from the panorama —
we're not so much interested in the sides, but just in the vertical down perspective
which will have the ending "_d" like "down".
There we go.
That should be virtually identical to this file here — and as you can see
they are pretty much identical except for some interpolation differences.
The next thing then is to just do away with this flare issue that I mentioned.
So let's open it in Photoshop . . . . . . there we go.
Now, a very handy tool is the "Patch tool".
It turns out to work very well in this panorama. I just draw around
the stuff we want removed . . .
. . . now drag it over here . . .
and then, after a little bit of "thinking",
all that area should be gone.
You can do some more retouching, obviously, but for the scope of this tutorial,
this should be enough, once this is finished.
Okay, that's that. We'll save the file and quit Photoshop.
So that's the corrected floor image here. Again, there's two things we can do:
If we did the same to the "down" image here created by KRPano Tools, we would
select the 6 files and just drop them back onto the "Convert CUBE to SPHERE" droplet
and then it would just re-assemble the original panorama but with the repaired floor patch.
Now how do we re-insert this in PTGui?
That's the second script that Erik wrote.
So all we're going to do is just go back into the main window of PTGui,
grab the edited floor image that we just repaired,
drop that back into here and then we just apply the template "Insert floor".
Now we have the floor back in here, however we don't have the original panorama . . .
So we go back into the "Create panorama" tab,
select this one down here which will put the other panorama back behind our new floor,
— and now you have the repaired floor.
That's the original one, and that's the new floor that we've repaired just on top and
blended together we now have the floor fixed. So all we have to do now is go back to
set optimum size, adjust the interpolator settings to whatever we want
and export the panorama. Then we will have the floor repaired in this image.
Ok, that's that. There's two techniques on how to fix the floor.
Thanks for your attention — and if there's any more questions please get back to me and I'm
happy to help you out. Alright? Thanks and goodbye.
Oh, there's one more thing. I will upload the two panoramas that we
created in this tutorial series
(that's the one from the repaired floor that we just saw today
as well as the one from tutorial no. 4) so I'll upload those two panoramas
to 360cities.net and you'll find the link below.