Camera Settings and Exposure
Set exposure, ISO, white balance and the shot interval so every scene of a tour is bright, sharp and consistent in colour.
This lesson covers the manual settings that separate a professional panorama from a smeared snapshot. You will learn which values to lock, which ones to leave on automatic, and how to bracket a dark room without losing the detail.
Lock the basics
Manual mode gives you control, but only if the values stay the same across the whole shoot. Set the shutter speed first, so a bright window cannot force the camera into a slow, blurred shutter, then adjust the aperture for depth and the ISO last.
- Switch the camera to manual mode with the automatic ISO turned off.
- Choose a shutter speed of 1/120 s or faster when people may be moving in the frame.
- Set the aperture between f/5.6 and f/8 for interiors and open it only in a dark room.
- Raise the ISO until the preview is bright enough, but stay below the level where noise becomes visible.
Fix the white balance
Set the white balance to a fixed Kelvin value instead of automatic, and use the same value for every scene of one tour. Automatic white balance shifts the colour between shots, and the tour then looks assembled from different days. For interiors with mixed light stay between 4000 and 4500 K, for daylight outdoors between 5200 and 5600 K.
Bracket when the room is dark
For windows and backlit doors, take a second and a third exposure of the same position without moving the camera. Blend them during the stitching step so the tour keeps the detail of the window instead of a blown-out white hole in the middle of the wall.
Keep the tripod, the camera and the framing in exactly the same place for bracketed frames. Any movement changes the projection, and the exposures will not align.