After retouching equirectangular panoramic images in Adobe Photoshop 2018 some people have experienced issues when publishing them to Facebook. The most common issue comes when the nadir has been retouched. When panning the panorama in Facebook it rotates around the X axis rather than panning around the Z axis.
This is most common when the editing work has involved the nadir.
You can see the result (Figure #1.) below where the Facebook panorama is rotating rather than panning.
The problem arises when you are editing a panoramic image in the 3D environment of Adobe Photoshop 2018 and you save the file by selecting: Menu | Spherical Panorama | Export Panorama
If the image in the canvas is not levelled to it's original position there will be varying degrees of the rotation effect. This is caused by the fact that Photoshop writes some additional GPano metadata to the file called 'PosePitchDegree' which is the Pitch, measured in degrees, for the center of the image.
Normally this would be blank or 0˚, in the example in Figure#1 the PosePitchDegree is 79˚ thus causing the offset rotation effect.
This additional metadata doesn't affect panoramas opened in desktop viewers such as FSPViewer or PTGui Viewer. Programs like Pano2VR, with it's levelling option can be used to level the panorama and on export the PosePitchDegree will be set to 0˚
Exporting without adding PosePitchDegree metadata
There is an alternative method to saving the retouched file that doesn't add in the additional metadata regardless of the orientation of the panorama in the 3D canvas.
In (Figure #2) the panorama is definitely not level and would normally result in the incorrect data being added.
Figure #2 - 3D Canvas and Layers Menu
1. In the Layers menu double click on the link 'SphericalMap' to open the 2D space (Figure #3)
Figure #3 - SphericalMap showing the original 2D space with retouching
In the SphericalMap the original equirectangular image, complete with retouching is shown.
2. Select: Menu/File/Save As...
3. In the Save As dialog box (Figure #4) select JPEG and Save
Figure #4 - Save As...
4. Set the JPEG Options (Figure #5) to your preference
5. Select OK to save the image
Figure #5 - JPEG Options
Publishing on Facebook
Once you have saved your retouched Panorama you can publish it on Facebook
1. Start a new post and drag/drop the new panorama into the post (Figure #6)
Figure #6 - Panorama loaded into the Facebook post
2. Set the Starting View by mousing over the small globe in the bottom right corner until you see the 'Edit 360 settings' (Figure #7)
Figure #7 - Edit 360 settings link
3. Select the starting view by re-orient the panorama using pan and zoom to the view that you want to show in your post. (Figure #8)
4. Select Save
Figure #8 - Select Starting view
5. You are ready to publish your post with your perfectly levelled panorama (Figure #9)
