[PentaxScott]

For a couple of years Ive been wanting to get a Theta, and I finally took the plunge and got an SC2 to play around in the world of 360 photography. Ive been impressed with it thus far, but had a few questions and wanted to get feedback from other Theta users:

First, what is everyones preferred method (or service) for displaying 360 photos online? Starting out, Im taking a lot of photos to practice and show the test shots to friends, but I dont want to plaster them all over Facebook, as with a lot of test shots, Ill probably delete them later on (no need to clog up feeds and such with demo shots).

Second, is there a preferred platform for editing 360 photos? The Theta app that allows editing on my phone is decent, but Im very used to something like Lightroom, where I have more advanced controls like sharpening and noise reduction. For some stylized shot like little planet photos, its easy to create the photo in the mobile app, and then edit it in a tool like Lightroom.

Im really liking it so far, but it really forces you to view (and edit) things differently!

[Glen_S]

I had the Theta S and used to post 360 images on the Theta site for it.

As far as editing goes, I think you can use any editing software out there. I found the video on the Theta S to be of such poor quality I never bothered with it much.

After my Theta S took a swim I replaced it with an Insta360 One R, which has a very powerful app for editing stills and video, and a slightly less powerful but still very good PC app as well.

[Ishpuini]

I have a Theta Z1 and use it to shoot RAW (DNG). I can import these into Lightroom for editing the DNG and after that use the official Lightroom plugin to convert this into a 360 image with the Lightroom edits applied.

For contrasty situations where I need higher dynamic range I use the DualFisheye plugin on the Z1 to capture a HDR DNG, which is registered in a different folder on the Theta Z1 and as such is not visible to the standard Theta apps, but can be imported into Lightroom and processed the same way.

If I want to process the resulting 360 image into a different projection such as a little planet, I've been using my preferred panorama stitcher PTGui Pro, though it's not ideal for that. I still haven't found a more convenient PC app for this however... I suppose I could also upload onto my phone and do the little planet there...

If the image needs removal of the camera/tripod/photographer, I sometimes take it into Photoshop's 3D editing interface prior to taking it into PTGui depending on the case. Unfortunately (last time I checked at least) this requires either 8-bit (loss of detail) or 32-bit (veeeeeery slow on my PC) mode since there's a bug in 16-bit mode that changes the colour dramatically (Adobe fails to fix/notice this)...