Shoot 360° panoramas without seams or colour jumps

Most 360° panoramas that look broken in a viewer were not broken in the stitching software. They were broken in the ten minutes before it: the tripod was too low, the sun was behind a window, and three different exposures were fused into one image.

This guide covers the decisions that determine the quality of the source file, using an 8K dual-lens rig as the reference and a single 360° camera as the simpler alternative. The output is the same either way: a 2:1 equirectangular image ready for upload.

Level the camera before anything else

• Mount the tripod horizontally; a two-degree tilt bends every straight line in the room and cannot be corrected in the viewer
• Put the camera at 150–170 cm — roughly adult eye height, so the furniture looks the way it will in the tour
• Keep the two lenses of a dual-lens rig exactly level with each other; a one-millimetre mismatch shows up as a seam
• Shoot manual exposure at ISO 100–200 and 1/60 s or faster, to keep moving people from smearing across the stitch

Light the room before you stitch

Stitching software cannot invent light the lens never saw. A room lit by a window and a 60 W lamp produces visible jumps between the top and bottom halves of the panorama, and no blend mode hides them properly.

1. Walk the space with the camera and check the histogram in the viewfinder, not on the screen
2. Turn off overhead spotlights that fall outside the frame, or accept a dark band
3. Expose for the brightest wall in the shot, then confirm the darkest corner is still readable
4. Shoot a second panorama 20–30 seconds later: people move, and an empty retake is often the better frame

Stitch with one consistent exposure

Blending works best when adjacent frames differ only by what moved, not by what the automatic exposure did. Fix shutter, aperture and ISO by hand before the panorama sequence, and let the software align frames instead of trying to correct the lighting afterwards.

• Lock white balance to a fixed Kelvin value; automatic white balance shifts between frames
• Keep the overlap at 30–40 %, the range most stitchers need for reliable alignment
• Export 2:1 equirectangular, not a cropped preview or a cubemap, unless you specifically need the GLB scene type
• Keep the raw stitched file before compressing — the upload limit is 40 MB, and the platform generates the derivatives for you

Shoot what the visitor expects to find

A tour is judged on two things: whether the seams are invisible, and whether the visitor can find the next scene. That means photographing doorways, thresholds and staircases on purpose, not just the most photogenic corner of the room.

One rig, one tripod, thirty minutes of shooting and a stable set of manual settings produce a source file that needs no retouching. Everything downstream — derivatives, previews, format conversion — Mango360 handles automatically once the file arrives.