360 Pano Photography

• #photography

For a few years, I had been thinking about getting an Insta360 X2 Action Cam to document places (I'm not much of an action guy ;-)). With the Insta360 X5 on the horizon, the older X2 models became a bit more affordable, so I got one.

After understanding the different ways and modes to take pictures, I ended up just using the 360 mode and rendering any other formats afterward in the app, if needed.

The Insta360 app is a camera remote control, photo gallery, editor, and social network in one.

In the editor, I can do much more with videos than with just photos. For photos, I can edit colors and blur faces. What I can't do—and that’s a shame—is re-align the horizon, change the center, or remove the tripod. I can put a logo on the tripod at the nadir, but that doesn’t look great.

Removing the Tripod

There were Photoshop plugins in the past, and there is open-source software that deals with panoramic images. But for desktop, Affinity Photo was the best and easiest software to edit projected 360 images. That means I can navigate to the nadir and retouch it. It’s not a shot in the dark editing the distorted bottom part of the image. In Affinity Photo, I can also realign and recenter the image. The software is affordable and recommended as a Photoshop alternative.

On mobile, I found TouchRetouch a good app that loads a 360 image and lets you remove the tripod with the brush tool. The AI remove isn't working so well in this regard. Unfortunately, with these apps, you have to subscribe—and this is definitely not an app I’d use every day, so a subscription isn’t justified. You can retouch one image a day for free, but come on. I ended up (nicely) complaining to the support, and they were kind enough to send me a discount code. So the price went down from a 60 EUR/year subscription to 15 EUR. Thanks!

To recenter objects, I didn’t find anything viable. There is ReShoot 360, but the once free app is now expensive, and I wouldn’t use all the features. I found edit360 to be the perfect tool, but for some reason, it wasn’t available in the German App Store. Apparently, I bought it at some point in the past, so I was still able to access it.

Sharing the Images

Originally, I wanted to contribute to Google Maps, but for some reason, they limited the options for getting a 360 pano into their maps. It’s still possible through the Insta360 app and other third-party services (which use Google’s Street View Publish API), but officially, they only want video.

Here’s what I found somewhat useful: