Types of Panorama Photo - an overview

Cylindrical Panorama
A classic type of panorama photography and should be the easiest type of panoramic photography. This type of panorama can be used for landscape. You just need stick on one point, the take series of overlap circular picture.




Spherical Panorama
Used to display the space around the point of shooting. Such panoramic photos can be used for various purposes. In this kind of panorama, the object will usually appear rounded, like a glass bulb projections

Spherical images are typically represented in equirectangular format image files, which represent exactly 360 degrees on the horizontal axis and 180 degrees on the vertical. These images are intended to be viewed as if projected using a special slide projector onto the inside of a sphere. Like cylindrical images, horizontal curves can be seen in the flat image, but unlike cylindrical images, the very top and bottom of the image will seem squashed. For panoramas with a large vertical field of view, the equirectangular (spherical) image format is far more efficient than cylindrical, but if you intend to print your images out, cylindrical images look better.

In practice any panoramic image can be stored with spherical projection in mind, meaning that it is intended to be displayed on the inside of a sphere... but the panoramic image does not need to be 180 degrees tall or 360 degrees wide. However if the image is less than 360 degrees wide, either the image must be padded with empty pixels, or the actual horizontal field of view needs to be noted down and provided to the display software so that the image is displayed correctly. ISeeMedia's PhotoVista software is an example of panoramic software that uses the spherical format for partial panoramic images.





Surface Panorama
Not a classic type of panorama. This kind of panorama used to produce high resolution format. Surface panorama usually combine some pictures that taken with wide lens.




Planar Panorama
Conventional photographs may be described as "flat" or "planar", meaning that they are intended to be viewed as is without any perspective correction.