Another apartment.

[Ben Rubinstein]

I've yet to get paid properly for doing a virtual tour however a realtor friend of mine has got me into some nice properties so I can build a portfolio. He's only used one of them (he paid a bit for that one) but today he even got me in a property which isn't on his books as he wanted me to have some decent stuff and pursuaded a friend to let me VT his apartment.

I've very pleased with this one. I'm getting the workflow going nicely now from shooting with my lovely Sigma 8mm which due to Valentin's help I've almost westled into submission, etc. I've solved most of the moire issues and most of the weird artefacts in the zenith though they still exist (have to do more testing but not at present).

My biggest problem is time. Shooting is pretty fast however the PP side is horrifically slow at the moment. I'm shooting for HDR so it's 12 images per pano (I had 14 pano's total). I'm batching the RAW's to Tiff. Working the Tiff's through PTGUI as fast as I can (2 hours), batching the resulting pano's through SNS-HDR (4 hours) and then rapidly cloning dust (I have the dustiest sensors on the planet!), doing a bit of PP and saving (1/2 an hour). Then comes the virtual tour. Even using Panotours when you are doing 14 seperate pano's, cross linking, adding tags to links, defining angles of view, zoom levels, etc. It all takes a suprising amount of time, a good hour. That gives me 8 hours of computer time (albeit only half of that hands on). I think when I do get a portfolio together, HDR shooting will be extra, it's 2/3 of the PP time if you include the PTGUI rendering for 3 seperate files with each pano.

Anyway I'm rather proud of this one, it looks rather more polished than my past attempts. I haven't put a nadir patch in yet but I'll get round to it for when I build the portfolio website.

Thanks for looking!

www.studio-beni.net/Bart.html

 

[Valentin Arfire]

hi Ben
thanks for sharing - it's great to see you are on the way with quite good results.

my opinion is that your tour is a nice one, presenting good the apartment and one who sees it has the actual experience to walk through the rooms and explore it.
I cannot but notice that the outdoors shouldn't have hdr because of the wind - but I suppose the customer isn't interested in transparent leaves on the opposite side of the road. I also notice you still have some stitching errors especially to the nadir - spend some time and put some points there too in ptgui and it will be better.

Given this purpose I think the idea to use bracketed tiffs is a huge time consumer, so better just use a "normal" image and squeeze a little the light and the shadows from DPP or your favorite raw transformer; stitching 3-4 images is of course a different story...

At the beginning I used a lot of tiffs but if no post-stitching processing is required, why spend the time?

I think that your images are a little overexposed - this shouldn't be a problem since the details are obvious and the interior conditions have their challenges (ie mixed light sources and dramatic dynamic)

when building the portfolio consider the rights you have to publish the images - of course you took them as professional photographer but in some places I know people are reluctant to give acceptance when is a matter of public exposing.

my 2 ¢

 

[Ben Rubinstein]

Thank you Valentin! I will of course be capping the nadir. The HDR for outside was a problem, The difference between the entrance of the house (very dark shade) and the highlights was 8 stops. I just couldn't hold it in a single exposure.

Can I ask how your screen is calibrated? Mine is calibrated perfectly for print but that does translate to 'hot' on non calibrated screens. I have to weigh processing for consumer screens however counter intuitive it may be as a photographer based on who will actually be viewing these pictures - consumers using super over bright and contrasty LCD screens.