I have been struggling to make the sky look reasonable at the zenith point of spherical panoramas. I found the following site which provides a series of equirectangular skies

You simply delete the sky from you Spark image and underlay the suplied sky images in equirectangular format in photoshop (or equivalent editor). You may need to stretch the layer a bit to get coverage and change brightness/colour to match you captured pano. It gives very good results. Make sure you get the sun in the correct position. To do this I cut the sky image in two parts and move the sun to correspond with shadows in the Spark pano then tack the other half of the sky image onto the reamining area.

I am sure there must be other sites out there?

These images come from the days when we captured aerial photos from kites. Anyone remember those days?

Sound great. I look forward to your works, please post the pictures here if you make it.

DJI Elektra Posted at 2017-11-19 22:44
Sound great. I look forward to your works, please post the pictures here if you make it.

I am still learning Photoshop skills but here is one I did of my home town yesterday. I left a small lump in the sky (just to the right of the lake). I have since found it is easier to underlay a bright red layer behind the Spark pano when deleting the sky to highlight missed bits like that described. If you look at the Zenith you will see that it provides a reasonable solution.  

my home town

Looks great, Kuula gives great results, even the lens flare from the sun :-)

kuula is nice!
But why do I also get a black hole on the bottom?
Which prog are you using for your stitching to a "flat" pano?

S-e-ven Posted at 2017-11-20 06:59
kuula is nice!
But why do I also get a black hole on the bottom?
Which prog are you using for your stitching to a "flat" pano?

That's odd, looking at it on my PC, there is no black hole, top or bottom ?

I use Microsoft ICE to stitch the individual photos taken in pano mode. I do not crop or autofill

Then I save the result of as a .jpg and open it in Photoshop.

I resize the image to 16,000 wide then resize the canvas to 8,000 high

I then copy the layer to the same canvas and make the original (locked) background invisible.(turn it off by clicking on "eye" symbol.)

I drag the image on the copied layer so that it aligns with the bottom of the canvas. This is what gets rid of that black hole.

I then open a layer of the same size consisting of only a bright red colour and move it behind the copied and shifted layer.

I now delete the sky using a variety of techniques - marquee delete, magic wand delete, rubber etc - so that I can clearly see the deletions showing the red where I have deleted. Any missed patches stand out like a sore thumb!  When happy I delete (or turn off) the red layer.

I open one of the appropriate skies mentioned in the original post. I resize it to 16,000 pixels wide . It is placed underneath the scene and its top edge is aligned with the top of the canvas.

If sun is involved the sky needs to be shifted to match the shadows in your scene. I then change the brightness of the sky so that it looks about right.

If you shifted the sky to match up the sun, you will have a gap to one side. Duplicate the sky layer onto the canvas and slide the copy in the opposite direction that you moved the original until the gap is just filled.

A final adjustment may be needed if the downloaded sky does not completely cover the area deleted in the original scene. Simply stretch (free transform) the sky down a little until it covers all the area needed.

Save as .jpg and upload to Kuula

I hope this is useful?

Thats a lot of work! And yes, it is useful
I may need more time with it ;-)

An addition of a polariser made the difference for me.

jksphoto Posted at 2017-11-20 07:35
That's odd, looking at it on my PC, there is no black hole, top or bottom ?

Sorry, MY flat Sphere photos, uploaded to Kuula, have 2 holes, sky and ground.
The one in the sky is understandable, the on from the ground not so much, since the info is available. So it has to be the process for the flat Sphere pic

S-e-ven Posted at 2017-11-20 08:41
Thats a lot of work! And yes, it is useful
I may need more time with it ;-)

It's not really that bad. Only the first part (up to where you align the image to the bottom of the canvas) should solve your problem with a black hole in the bottom. The rest is dealing with the hole in the sky which may be of less interest to you. The tedious part is removing the original sky. I am still on a steep learning curve myself but I love these panoramas.