It turns out the thread was bout using LED lights…working with led fill lights
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You edit your Plantix panos in LR?? How? I do everything on stitch. I have no issues on quality.
Thank you for all your explanations. I appreciate it very much!
Even the IMS5, I feel doesn’t have the greatest picture quality. I haven’t shot with the other iguide variants, but I have shot with the matterport system and the quality feels night and day. I’ve learned recently to remove auto exposure and set it manually every time. Settings are usually -5EV/+1-+2EV. I dont know about you but sometimes the preset light settings can’t quite capture the tint properly - it would be great if there was a Tint slider to dial in the magenta and greens, to compliment the temperature slider. Sometimes the color sampler just can’t get it perfect.
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Try underexposing a tiny bit on your next shoot with challenging light - looks like there was a bit of noise in the blacks and the highlights are hard to handle with all that light coming from outside. I’ve even gone down to -7EV at times to handle all the light. You’ll get a little more pull from the highlights but a little less detail in the shadows of the blacks, its pretty much a game of give and take. I wish iguide would let us change the amount of images the camera takes instead of the standard 3, but then comes the size factor of the files, uploading etc. Good luck on your future shoots man.
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Hey Raffa-
Here’s another lighting solution I came accross…Assistance with lighting for Planix Pro
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check this out if you need light in very dark spaces
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Thanks for the tip!
But where can this be attached at the iGUIDE PLANIX?
Thank you.
Go to the website and you will find videos showing how it’s used. Basically it mounts between the tripod and the Planix as it has threads on the top and bottom.
I’m getting pretty sick of the image quality too. Editing with Lightroom helps some, but then replacing the original images with the edited ones is super time-consuming, and still not good enough. I’ve been working for hours on a project to try to get it to look ok, with no luck. I took a cell phone picture while at the shoot of the wall color in a particular room so I could be sure to match it (I made sure at the time that the cell photo showed an accurate color). The wall is beige and the iGuide photo shows it as straight-up yellow. Nothing I have tried has been able to correct it.
What version of firmware are you running on your theta z1? The latest Firmware is a great improvement over the last few firmware updates.
I edited my photos from time to time myself depending on how the capture went. However, I don’t use Lightroom because it’s too time consuming. I use aurora hdr as it’s a lot faster and brings out better details and colour.
Version 2.20.3. According to the Theta website, the only thing that has been changed in the one more recent update is a bug fix.
Are you using the Ricoh HDR or one of the other settings?
Can you upload your pictures? I’m curious to see the difference.
Here’s the phone picture.
And here is a link to the iGuide. I actually switched part-way through the job from the Ricoh HDR to the -5EV/+2EV (the scan of this area was Ricoh HDR), but color accuracy did not improve.
Well, my best guess is that there are a couple factors at play here.
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There isn’t a lot of natural light in darker areas (based off your cellphone photo). And it’s quite busy with the different colours of lighting. It looks like the Theta tried to bring that lighter exposures up a bit too much, even the table colour doesn’t show properly.
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The -5EV/+2EV, in my experience, doesn’t perform very well in those conditions. Either Ricoh HDR or -3EV/+3EV would give you better balance. I would have experimented with those shutters for natural light to tone down the interior lighting over powering the situation there. I have found in SOME cases that lights off, with enough natural light, will produce better results. You’ll see a big difference in your preview as you take them.
Hope this helps you some. 
How much post-processing do you do in Stitch? I pretty much always lower yellows and get rid of blues in most shots in Stitch; does the job for me, but IG is a secondary offering for my business. Fact of the matter is that the Z1 simply isn’t that a good a camera: I had much better results using IM-5 camera, but I sold that and went Planix for the speed.
I edit shadows too, exposure and yellow and blue. Shadow edits are done in photoshop.
The dynamic range is better with the ims-5 which is why i bought that first. I have blth and the speed is so much better with the planix but clients have never commented on the quantity difference so i plan to sell my ims- 5 and get a 2nd planix soon
Same: I was girding myself for the complaints when I went from IMS5 to Planix, heard only crickets. Seems Good Enough is often good enough.
Not my standard but was having to edit glars out of so many photos on my ims-5 that the benefits out weigh the negatives
@EvanH
I’ll have to try lights-off sometime to see. But my experience so far has been that open blinds produce a pretty bad glare. This pano was with the Ricoh HDR.
I really love the iGuide system, and Planitar’s support has been great. I just hate fighting color issues.
If there’s nothing that can be done about the colors that come out of the camera, maybe there’s something that can be done to help facilitate easier editing. All of the pano files are named the same thing, which is problematic. When I want to edit my panos with lightroom, I either have to import, edit, export, and replace original files - one at a time (because you can’t export multiple files with the same name), or import, edit, and export in a batch with exported files getting renamed (e.g. h1(28).jpg), and then trying to match those up with the folder in which they originated and deleting the old file, placing the new one, and renaming it. Both of those options are too cumbersome to be practical. But if the pano files were already named in sequence (e.g. h28.jpg) when they were created, that would avoid the issues caused by working with multiple files with the same name. I don’t know if it is possible for Planitar to do that, but it would make my work a lot easier if that change could be made.
@schmal
I usually get rid of most blue and some-to-most yellow, but in this case it looked awful if I brought down the yellow more.
To your point, the client ended up raving over how great it turned out. It doesn’t look great to me, but if they are happy then that’s good enough.