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How can I edit an equirectangular image that was taken with a Ricoh Theta S?

I would like to add text and/or "stickers".

Is this possible with a tool like ImageMagick?

Sample as requested: times square

And the same image in a 360 viewer.

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  • Why is editing an equirectangular image different from editing any other sort of image?
    – Philip Kendall ♦
    Feb 5, 2016 at 11:19
  • Because the normal tools assume the image is planar and any additions would appear distorted.
    – laktak
    Feb 5, 2016 at 11:46
  • Ah, so you want to add text onto surfaces in the picture, rather than just a watermark or the like?
    – Philip Kendall ♦
    Feb 5, 2016 at 11:53
  • I think it would be good to add an example image.
    – null
    Feb 5, 2016 at 13:54
  • I believe images from a Ricoh Theta S are not static images. You need software to view them and they are interactive panoramas.
    – Mike Sowsun
    Feb 5, 2016 at 14:12

3 Answers 3

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ImageMagick can't do this—it doesn't do projection remapping. But there are a number of other tools that do. I'm pretty sure that Hugin or panoramas tools scripting or Gimp and Mathmap could get you there, but I'm lazy so I paid for a license for a commercial application called Pano2VR. Pano2VR can remap equirectangulars to cube faces. Because the cube faces are rectilinear projections, they'll be a closer approximation to what a 2D viewer displays than the equirectangular gives. You can then edit the cube face(s) in any editor (like the Gimp), replace it/them, and map all six faces back out to an equirectangular.

Another trick, if you're just trying to mess with the nadir (straight down view), is to re-orient the pano up 90° in tilt by dragging vertically in the preview, or setting the viewpoint explicitly (there's a numerical transform button in PTGui; not sure what it would be in Hugin), so that the middle of the pano is the floor and exhibits the least distortion. You then edit the equirectangular, and then readjust tilt back down to 90°. See John Houghton's Viewpoint Tutorial.

Addendum:

Nice choice of viewpoint. This is just my personal taste, but I'd also rotate the pano in yaw so you're in the center of the frame, not split at the edges, and fix the roll/tilt so your horizon isn't bowed and your verticals are vertical, like so:

edited pano

This took about five seconds in Hugin's preview window's move/drag tab--dragging vertically changes pitch, dragging horizontally changes yaw, and right-dragging changes roll.

But, then, I'm persnickety about these things. :)

See also: How to reproject and crop a 360°x180° panorama?

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You can also use PtEditor.

You can extract a rectangular image and inject it back, although getting your hands on pteditor is no easy job.

http://www.photocreations.ca/panotools/

So far i found it here but does not have the pano12.dll

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I recommend using the Photoshop plugins from PanoTools.

They're a bit strange to use, but I ended up using those as opposed to the PtEditor.

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  • Can you expand a bit on why you chose these plugins over PtEditor?
    – inkista
    Aug 22, 2016 at 17:35
  • Well, because i could not get PtEditor to work again. So i gave those a try and now i like them. (Given one has photoshop)
    – mhstnsc
    Aug 25, 2016 at 8:46

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