Beginners Guide To The Ricoh Theta Z1 For 360 Photos

Ricoh offers a stitching application for your 360 images. The application is actually a plugin to Adobe's Lightroom. It is not a stand alone application (although there's a workaround), and for 360 photographers who want to use the Theta Stitcher you'll need to use Lightroom as well. There are 3rd party stitching applications out there, such as PTGui as well, so you're not tied to having to use Lightroom.

As this course was being built I did manage to get Richo's Stitcher to work. While most of this class will feature PTGui, you will see Ricoh's Lightroom Plugin in action.

Ricoh offers smart phone apps for running your Theta Z1. In this lecture we'll take a look at the Z1's app on iOS. The layout of the app is very similar to the Android version that we'll be showing in the next video

In this video we'll walk back through Ricoh's Android app. There are subtle differences to take note of compared to the iOS app. Those differences will be pointed out in this video.

Out of the box you can begin shooting 360s with your Z1. The Theta App allows you to create new 360 images very quickly. It also offers several types of "pre-set" photo modes which we'll take a look at in this video.

In this video we'll take a photo with each of the basic modes offered by the Theta App. A standard image, Dynamic Range compensation, HDR, Handheld HDR, and a Noise Reduction mode. We'll take the same photo from the same location for each of the offered modes.

In this video we'll load our images into Lightroom and take a look at the difference in image quality for each of the shooting modes we used in the last video. Spoiler alert! The HDR mode does the best job on interiors with "Lighting challenges."

In this video we do a walk through of an empty home that's going on the market soon. In total we captured 20 images throughout the home, and created a virtual tour with Kuula. You can use any 360 tour assembler you'd like to, and for our business we utilize Kuula.

Students will get to see the images in lightroom, we'll quickly talk about editing possibilities, and then we'll build the full tour.

Take note: This isn't a 360 editing course. But in order to show the quality of images captured with the Z1 we do need to take a look at the editing process, tour assembly, and final product.

In the 2 videos that follow this one, we'll setup a multi bracketed image with our Android tablet, take the shots, and then move on to editing the final image. Unfortunately there were some issues with White Balance and color cast leading to a less than optimal final image.

Ricoh's multi bracket mode is a powerful tool, and can generate 360s that allow more detail than many other modes. But mistakes can happen, and you should see those as well as our successes.

After completing our Multi Bracketed photo it's time to jump into Lightroom and see what our efforts yielded. We'll do a HDR photo merge in Lightroom and then start editing our image to our own tastes. Please note, the white balance is a little far off in this one and I'm not satisfied with the final results. I'm sharing the mistakes with you as well because mistakes are part of our learning process.

Following up on a failed multi bracket 360, we'll assemble a 360 that works correctly. With some post processing time, these multi bracket images can help you achieve 360s with more "pop" than the standard features allow on the Z1.

Ricoh offers a wide variety of plugins for the Theta Z1. The Dual Fisheye plugin is just one example, but there are many more plugins you may want to try out. We'll talk about how to add the Dual Fisheye Plugin to your Z1 before we dive into its uses here.

Ricoh's ability to add plugins to the Z1 is pretty amazing. What didn't come stock on the camera can potentially be added to the camera. The most sought after plugin for the Z1 has to be the Dual Fisheye plugin. It allows users to setup bracketed images (similar to the Multi-bracket feature), and generate HDR DNGs.

If you were looking to make multi-bracket images (let's say 9 of them), the dual fisheye plugin will take the 9 brackets, condense them into a single HDR DNG, and save you a good deal of storage space on your camera and on your computer (once imported). The HDR DNGs are potentially a powerful tool for virtual tour pros.

In this video we're going to walk through the setup of the Dual Fisheye plugin for making HDR DNGs.

After generating your HDR DNGs with the Dual Fisheye Plugin we've got to edit the images. Will they produce a higher quality product than the onboard Multi-Bracketing feature on the Z1? Let's take a quick look.

Using Ricoh's Stitcher is proving to me to be faster than PTGui. Let's take a quick look at a HDR DNG file from the Dual Fisheye Plugin and finish it with Ricoh's stitcher

In this video we're going to look at editing the HDR DNGs generated by the Dual Fisheye plugin. I'm including the original files for you to try and work with as well.

Want to be able to take 360 images with your Z1 and keep yourself completely out of frame? Would you like to also not have to hide from your camera while you're taking your 360 photos? Well...you're in luck. The Time Shift plugin can help you get your shots while standing right next to your camera.

Before diving in we're going to chat about the Stand Alone Stitcher.  While convenient, it's still a little cumbersome without Lightroom

In this class segment we'll talk about the Lightroom Workflow.  It is the recommended workflow from Ricoh, even with the stand alone stitcher now available.

While Ricoh has released the stand alone Stitcher, its something of a process. While learning about the stand alone stitcher for this class segment I have to say I was more than a little frustrated. Importing images from the Z1 to an unmanaged folder was a bit of a chore. Understanding that after editing images (RAW editing and standard editing) you need to keep the file name similar to a DNG made little sense. It's not a work flow that I would personally embrace. But, it is an option for students who do not want to use Lightroom. I'm sure with time and practice users could speed the process along at a better pace than my initial testing.