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Permalink Reply by Chris Chaffee on April 24, 2011 at 12:22pm

This is not a new problem to any tour platform, it is a monitor moire that will happen when sharp vertical lines pass over pixel columns. The fix is quite easy - don't over-sharpen images, in fact out of the camera default sharpness is sufficient. 

Sorry, Mike, I know this doesn't help much on a tour that has already been posted, the only solution there is photo replacement. But on future projects, try the following:

1. Set in camera sharpening to normal. Turn off auto sharpening. This is the best starting point.

2. In Lightroom, when exporting photos, set sharpening for screen, amount standard or low, or even off if needed. Same in your panos, control your sharpening.

3. Test! Upload samples at varying degrees of sharpening, use Ken Burns effects to see what works best, and make notes, save as presets or actions in Lr and Ps.

4. Educate your clients on the process. Explain that when viewed in a small window, flat panel monitors will tend to show the vertical moire (pronounced more-ray), look at it in a medium or larger screen. 

Razor sharp images are nice, but when put in motion in panos or with light zoom effects, will moire on any platform. It's the sharpness of the monitor's pixel arrays that is the main problem. Less sharpness looks just as good when the threshold is found that greatly reduces the moire. 

 

Cheers,

Chris

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Permalink Reply by Alan Pinstein on April 24, 2011 at 8:24pm

Chris is right in general; this is an inherent problem in displaying slightly-moving images with high acutance.

 

We have a few tricks to reduce this problem, but they have quality trade-offs. Blurring is one such example. We also resize images to the actual size they're being shown at which also helps, but presently we do this only with still images and not panos.

We are working on brining that technology to the panos as well.

Alan 

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