How to make a facebook 360 panorama from any photo

 

Credit by : photoshopCAFE

How to Make a Facebook 360 Panorama From Any Photo Hey Cafe crew, it's Colin Smith here. This week, I'm going to show you how to create a 360 VR Panorama in Facebook. So last week, I uploaded an interactive 360 degree VR panorama to Facebook and I haves ton of people asking me how do you do this?So the cool thing about this is when you're on a mobile device and you look at this photo,you can actually move your phone around, you can look up, you can look down, and it's fully immersive and interactive, which is super cool. On the desktop, you can see, we have to kind of just click and scrub around to do it, but I had a lot of people ask me how to do this. I'm going to show you right now. But, first, is to create a panorama and I have tutorials on that already, check out the link. I'll give you a link right now to create the panorama. Then once you've done it, I'm going to show you how to make it work on Facebook. There are basically two things. The first thing is you need to have some metadata and I'm going to show you how to upload itto the web and get metadata, or just use a template that I'll provide for you. And the second thing, there's certain ways you want to set up your photo. There's actually a size that you want to do and the proper horizon line will actually give you much better results. And then, I've got another little trick that I put in there to get rid of like having justa hard seam in there. So let's just jump in and do it right now. All right, here's my panorama that I shot with my drone. You can also do this with your iPhone. You can do it with a camera on a tripod, however you want to do it, and I have a tutorial,I'll show you how to create the panorama. Now, there's a few things you need to do to this panorama to make it work properly on Facebook as a 360. So the first thing we want to do is create a new document, so we're just going to choose File, New, and we want to set this to 6,000 by 3,000, so we're just going to click OK. So there we go, we've basically just created our shape as the shape we're going to use. Then, we're going to grab our image here. This is a 16-bit, I'm just going to make sure I convert it to an 8-bit, and that just help maintain some of the colors when I drag it through into this new document, so there wego. So, now, we want to scale this. I'm just going to hit Ctrl T, that's Command T on Mac, for free transform. I'm just going to link that and then just pull it down until I can get it to fit. So I'd just pull it all the way down. Now, what you really want to do, if you can, is shoot a full 360 degree panorama. In this case, I didn't go the full 360 degrees. Now I went pretty far, but as you can see there, I kind of didn't go all the way because I've just got ocean behind me, which is not very interesting. Now one of the things I did here is just make sure you've got nice, clear areas on both sides, so this will stitch nicely when we flip it together, and, also, I've got some boats and stuff here, so when you look down, it's going to be interesting. Now the thing to bear in mind is when you put this together, the horizon is going to start in about the center of the page. So there's several different ways of finding the center, but let me show you one quick way if we just go into View Guides, New Guide Layer here. So we click on the New Guide Layer and we can just change this. If we change these columns and rows just to 2, it will give us the center point right there. So we can keep that 3, it doesn't really matter, but this is going to be the center, so thesis about where we're going to start viewing things. So, sometimes, it makes a good idea to just kind of pull this up a little bit, and I want the center of it to be about there. That was looking pretty good. Now what you want to do is you want to stretch it a little bit, so just hit Ctrl T or Command T, and I'm going to hit the Alt or the Option key, and I'm going to pull it down a little bit. I'm going to stretch, but not too far, probably, about there. Once you've done a couple of these, you'll start to really understand the right amount. You could stretch it all the way if you wanted. Actually, let me go a little bit more. I'm sure I can get away with it. Let's take it to about there because these views are actually going to change as you look around. So what we need to do now is we just need to fill in a little bit at the bottom and we need to fill in a little bit at the top. So what I'm going to do is hit Ctrl and click, and what that is doing is selecting all the areas of transparency, so we're going to inverse this selection. So we're going to choose Select, Inverse, and this is actually kind of similar to what I do when I do my tiny planet effect, actually. So what we're going to do now is we're just going to choose the Select. We want to increase it just a little bit, so what we're going to do is expand this justly 5 pixels. And, now, what we're going to do is we want to just fill this in, but I want to make sure that we don't have any gaps there, so I'm just going to hit Shift Delete, or Shift Backspace on Windows, and that's going to bring up Content Aware right there under Fill, choose Content Aware, click OK. Now this is the way I'm choosing to start doing this, filling in these edges. And you can see, it actually does a pretty good job, so it doesn't have to be perfect,like you just hit Ctrl D to turn off the selection, but you know what?That's going to look pretty good. And up there, it's looking pretty good. If you see any areas that are obvious there, we just want to kind of clean those up a little bit. You might make a little bit of a selection around those just using the Lasso Tool because I see that line there, it looks a little fake, and I'm just going to fill this. Now you can use a Clone Stamp or however you want to do this, because if you don't haveCC that has all these features, like here, it looks a little fake because that's doubling it up, and I'm just using Content Aware. Once again, you can use a Clone Stamp if you want. Now this image is prepared as far as this is the image that we're going to bring into Facebook to look at. So the next thing we want to do is make sure that these edges match. We don't want any of these edges to look, you know, so fake, so that we don't see them,so I'm just going to take this guide out of the way here. And, so, we want this to match perfectly, so I'm going to make a selection around the edge here. See that?I made that selection right there. I've selected that area and I'm going to copy that to a new layer. So I'm going to hit Ctrl J or Command J, and, notice, it copies that selection to a new layer. So what we want to do with this new layer is we're going to move it to the other side. So I'm holding Shift to drag it all the way over, and we want that end to be right onthe end there. Let me just move that over a little bit. And that's about right there. So we're looking for a pixel perfect end. Now this part here is going to match there, so what we want to do is make it seamless,so we're going to flip this. Just hit Ctrl T, and then, we're going to right click, and we're going to choose Flip Horizontal. So, now, this edge is going to be identical to this edge. So what we're doing is getting rid of that seam, so we don't have an obvious seam when we're looking around in 3D. So we just want to blend these two together, so we're going to grab our Gradient Tool. Set that foreground to background. That's going to be black to white right there. See that?There's the first option--Linear Gradient. So what we're going to do is just start and pull it across. Oops, I made a little mistake there. I want to apply a Layer Mask. We apply a Layer Mask and now we can pull that gradient across. And see how we just got that smooth gradient there?That's not quite what I wanted, so let's just play around a little bit with that, and we just want to get something, so it looks like it's going to blend in. This will go too far, obviously, but I want to start there to get all the way across to there. Nice. See how that's just a little bit smoother and that's just going to create a little bit more of a seamless blend. Now, you're going to see that blend there, and if you shoot a full 360 here, actually,you're not going to get that. So what we're going to do is I'm just going to grab that there, grab these two layersand just hit Ctrl E, and that will just kind of flatten those in. All right, so we've essentially prepared the image, and, now, what we want to do is wewant to save this image out as a jpeg, but the thing that we need to do, though, is weened to edit the metadata in order to make this work as an actual 360. So, there's two ways to do this. One is to paste it in to a document which already has the metadata applied, and, actually,I'll give you one of those, so you can actually see the link there in the link underneath,and you can grab that off PhotoshopCAFE, just a blank document with a metadata. The other option is you can append the metadata yourself. So let me show you what we're going to do. We're going to choose File, Export, and we're just going to choose Safe for Web. So we want to keep this at 3,000 by 6,000, that's the maximum size. You could go smaller, but just keep that aspect ratio intact, so just click that, you know,you could scale it down to have that uniformly scaled, if you want; but I'm not going todo that because I want to put this back to 100% here, because I want to keep this atthe 6,000, so let's go there. I want it at maximum size, 6,000 by 3,000, and then, make sure that if you are usingthe metadata, the one that I gave you, that you preserve all your metadata, and the wayto do that is under see the words, there's Convert to sRGB. You might see this. Make sure All is selected, and then, just hit Save, and you're going to find your locationto save it. So I'm going to drop this on my desktop, and I'm going to call it my 360-FBbefore, because I haven't done the metadata yet. And so we can see, here's one I've got. It's called 360-Template. I'll give you that one and you could just, actually, at this point, if you were usingthat template, you would save it out to jpeg, and you would just upload it to Facebook immediately,but, in this case, I'm going to show you the whole process. So, now, we've saved that, we want to go a website. So let's open up that web browser, heifer. net right there, and this is just one place youcan do it. You can find other places, but this enables us to change the file information online,so we're just going to choose Upload, so we're going to click here, so we're going to grab this Before and we're going to click Choose. So, now, we're going to upload this. All right, so now that it's uploaded, you want to edit it. So you're going to choose Mexico, and then, what we want to do is we want to change the camera make. And you've seen that this Ricohs make the 360s, so we want to pick that, and then, we're going to go in here. And notice that you'll see all the different makes from there, and we want to use right there, so there we go, so there's the Thata S, so choose that. Nice. And then, we're just going to scroll down and we're going to choose Go Exif, so that's applied the exif to there now; so that metadata's changed, and we're just going to close that up, so there it is. So, now it's there, we want to Download Me, so there's our image, and we can right click and you could save it to wherever. Save it to your desktop or I'm going to save it to Downloads, and so, okay, that's done. Let's just go back to the page, and then, remove the file. So, now, you removed that file, it's not there anymore, it's done. All right, so let me just show you where this metadata lives now. So just open the image here. This is the one that we just exif, and if you just choose File, and then, just go downto File Info or Command Shift Option I, or Ctrl Alt Shift, whatever, hold down all thekeys, and then, hit the I key on Windows or Mac, and you can see, here's the exif. It gives some information about it and if you choose here--Camera data--you can see we got the Rico That right there, and that's it. And if you have that information in there, when you upload that to Facebook, it's goingto detect it as a 360 and it's automatically going to set it up as a VR 360. And, now, I want to upload that picture. So I'm going to choose here. I'm going to set it to Only Me, so I can test it, so the whole world doesn't see it, and I'm going to choose Upload Photos right there. So, now, I'm going to go to the one that I just put into my Downloads folder. There it is right there, and I'm going to click Choose. Now I'm uploading it. And I'd be like, "Hey Guys check it out," and I would go live with this one around thetime I put the tutorial on, so you can go to my Facebook wall _[00:11:45]Colin and youcan see this. All right, so there we go. You see that little icon there?It shows us that we've got a VR 360, so now I'm just going to click Post. And, obviously, right now, I'm testing it because it's just me. And here it is, look at that, we got our 360. Now, I'm on the desktop, so I'm just kind of clicking around here, so you can't necessarily see all the coolness, but when you're on your phone, and you move this around in your phone,you're going to be able to look at the whole thing interactively. You can see there's our seam there. You know, you could put a little color in if you wanted to make it match better, but,essentially, that's it. And at that point, you would just go live and let the whole world see your lovely 360pano, and that's all there is to it. All right guys, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial on creating this interactive VR 360 degree panorama for Facebook. Now this also works for things like Skypixel and other places. So, anyway, if you liked this, become part of the Cafe crew. Hit that Subscribe button right now and you'll get free tutorials every week. Add a Like if you liked it. Don't forget to share it with your friends and add a comment. Until next time, I'll see you at the Cafe.