360 Camera Techniques

Seamless 360 photo editing: How to batch edit 360 photos without a seam

An edited 360 photo showing a visible seam
An edited 360 photo showing a visible seam

If you want your 360 photos to look their best, you need to edit them.  However, when you edit a 360 photo in Photoshop, Lightroom, or other software, you will usually find a seam.  But now there is a way to batch edit 360 photos without a visible seam.  Here to tell us how is Ric Tan, a 360 photographer based in Australia, who is also a developer for My 360 Shop, a platform for 360 photographers to sell their photos.

Most experienced photographers edit their 360 photos. But when you colour-correct or grade a 360° photo, it usually creates a visible seam, as in the photo above, especially when you adjust the highlights, shadows, contrast, or clarity.

Stephan Baum created an Android app called “AntiSeam360” that addresses this. It’s great, but the workflow requires you to do a pre-colour-correct process, you colour-correct, and then apply the post-colour-correct process. It’s also limited to processing one file at a time and it only works on Android.

When I do a photoshoot, I’ve got dozens of images to process, most of them with the same colour adjustments, so I had to come up with a way to edit them all “seamlessly”. Inspired by Stephan’s app, I’ve created a Photoshop script which I’ve named “Seamless360Edit”.

Downloading and installing the Photoshop script

Download the free Photoshop script at my360shop.com/seamless360edit

This video shows you how to install and run the script, as well as explaining exactly how the script works:

To give you some background, as a 360 photographer, you know to avoid the edge of the camera so that the subject isn’t caught in the stitch line. The problem is that this means that the lens is facing the subject directly.

An unstitiched photo showing where the stitch and seam lines occur
An unstitiched photo showing where the stitch and seam lines occur

This results in the person facing the back lens being in the middle of the seam. That is, the edge of the photo that wraps around and touches the other edge of the photo.

When you edit the colours in a photo, most image editors, including Photoshop will look at the neighbouring pixels in order to determine the relative changes that should be made to each pixel. The thing about a 360° photo is that the relative changes should be based on the pixels that continue on the other side of the image. In other words, the other side of the seam. But these programs currently don’t.

The Seamless360Edit Photoshop script will apply the same colour correction to all the photos in a folder without causing that ugly seam line. After you install and run the script, it will ask you for the folder that contains the 360 photos to be edited. Then it will open all the photos in that folder and do its magic.

Crop of a seamless edit from 360 photo
Crop of a seamless edit from 360 photo

Supported file types

The Seamless360Edit script has been tested with photos from the Xiaomi Mi Sphere as well as the Insta360 One X, which have different image dimesions (6192 x 3456 px and 6080 x 3040 px respectively). Unlike Photoshop Actions, Photoshop Scripts are able to perform calculations and change dimensions relatively.

The script supports JPEG, TIFF and DNG raw files. It will create an edited version of each photo with “done-” added to the start of each file name. This way, you can still edit the original if the colour-correction for a particular photo is different from the others in that folder.

You will still need to manually remove chromatic aberration, as that requires using masks that are specific to each photo. I also haven’t added clone stamping out the nadir or adding a logo patch to it. If you’re adding a logo patch, you can already do that in bulk with a Photoshop action anyway.

I hope you find this script useful. Happy editing your 360 photos seamlessly!

About the author

Ric Tan

15 Comments

Click here to post a comment

Leave a Reply to Mic Ty Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • tried on CS6, doesn’t seems to work.

    Mic, possible to see if one is available for older version of Photoshop? thanks.

  • I’ve never had this issue with KM360 JPEGs. Whether I process them straight from camera of after I recenter them in Hugin, they come out of PS postprocessing without any problems. Maybe it’s a problem with cameras that don’t stitch on the fly?

    • Hi dnbrv. This is an issue that can affect any 360 camera. it depends on the editing you do and the type of editor. PS is 360-aware so it doesn’t happen on PS, but on other editors, it often happens.

  • Does the Seamless360Edit script also work in “Photoshop Essentials! Normally I work with the program “Affinity Photo”.

    • Hi Thomas. I don’t know if it works in Photoshop Elements. I think it should, because the script is not complex. I think it’s worth a try. On affinity, you can create your own script by duplicating the equirectangular image lengthwise, applying the edits, and recropping to the normal width.

  • Good day Ric Tan,
    I managed to copy your script into my Photoshop CS6 & CC2018 & just load in 1 Panorama still made from Panorama Studio after touchup the sky with structure from Viveza. But unfortunately after loaded this touchup Panorama into either CS6 or CC2108 after some times of processing the monitor display a warning ” The command “Select” is not currently available” Any advice to rectify my problem.

  • Hi It do not work for french PSD users. I think It is because our merge layer is called “Arrière-Plan” and not “Background”. Could you do something for that ? Thanks 😉
    Here is the message error
    “1302 error: unavailable element – Line#37 -> doc.activeLayer = doc.layers [“Background copy” ];”

  • Hello. Does the initial single photo process shown in your video need to be done for each different shot? For example, if I have 5 different interior photos shot in different rooms where lighting will likely vary, and/or outdoor shots where the location & scenery change, or sunny in one shot and sun behind the clouds in another? Is this script mostly for applying the effect to multiple variations of the same shot from the same location? Thx!

  • If you import a photo taken from the Insta360 One R in adobe photoshop, will it have a seam line?

    • Hi Saab900D. There won’t be a seamline. If there is a seam, there is some type of user error such as incorrect editing.