with such an amount of source images, the photomerge engine in PS, LR, and ACR chokes even on machines with many RAM bars built in. PS tries to load as much as possible into memory and then does the stitching process. starting with a huge layer stack after loading the source images, it mostly get's insane with the subsequent extension of the canvas happening with this multi-layer file. as soon as PS needs to swap out stuff, it goes into super snail mode or even stalls completely. you should try an app with a memory management better suited for such tasks (iterative stitching), e.g. hugin (https://hugin.sourceforge.io/) or ptgui (https://ptgui.com/). the latter is the industry standard for a reason. ... View more

PS PM hasn't made major progress for at least a decade and it's a just-okay add-on to PS combined with memory management definitely not suited for a larger amount of source images. the same is valid for the very similar stitching engine in ACR and LR. MS ICE has the significant disadvantage that you can't control the app in detail. among 3rd party apps you find ptgui which is the industry standard for stitching even insanely large panoramas. it has a free (open source) sister app, based on the same roots (old panotools) and named Hugin: https://hugin.sourceforge.io. both apps, based on the panotools concept have a way better memory management with iteratively doing the stitching process and they are way more precise in correcting the lens distortion before stitching. it comes with a learning curve, but the results are worth it. ... View more

there was a time, when interactive 360° content was mainly produced with Adobe Flash. the resulting swf files could be displayed inside of PDF docs. as this isn't possible anymore, there's a plan B i often use, as i'm doing professional 360°/VR productions: you can install a local webserver hosting the folder your 360° content lives in as a real website. then you can use a simple web link inside of your PDF presentation to start the 360° panos from there. for installing a local webserver there are various concepts. a minimal one is to use the krpano local servers (https://krpano.com/download/, you don't need to buy the software for using the small webservers of this package). another way is to use a convenient webserver app like https://www.mamp.info/en. ... View more

even with the old 3D features the creation of 360° spherical panos wasn't really good, especially when it came to retouching the tripod / floor / nadir. using the current version without having this feature anymore you might think about a 3rd party solution. if you won't spend any money, you might have a look at hugin: https://hugin.sourceforge.io. very powerful with professional results, but pretty techy and with a certain learning curve. the industry standard is ptgui: https://ptgui.com/ - not really cheap, but this app can handle even problematic captures with absolutely professional results. it has the same roots as hugin, but is easier to handle. ... View more

the original photo reminds me of a well known scenery at the Lake Constance (Austria, Germany, Switzerland) with the famous Lindau harbour. Just added the (kind of) Swiss Alps beyond the distant lake shore with AIGF (prompt: "add swiss alps seen from lindau (lake constance)") and a lighthouse landmark (prompt: "add lindau lighthouse (lake Constance)"). some minor tweaks applied ... ... View more

you can use https://nadirpatch.com/ (sphere => cube) to convert the panorama and then retouch the flat cube faces and then re-convert the cube faces back to a sphere. ... View more

wie schaut das "seltsame" bild aus? ... View more

you should https://ptgui.com give a shot. here you can play with many different projections and force vertical lines in the image to stay vertical. usually, this works better than the PS tools. especially this bending you describe which occurs when taking a panorama capture with a positive tilt angle and which can be very difficult to handle in PS, can be corrected with ptgui very precisely. ... View more

together with hugin, https://ptgui.com has its roots in the original PanoTools. while ptgui is commercial and evolved into the quasi industry standard, hugin stayed open source. ptgui also has its learning curve but has a way better usability and pro features. ... View more

i agree with adobe to re-focus on PS as an image editing app and remove 3D features in favor of their new substance suite. when it comes to (360°) panorama stitching there were always way more professional solutions on the market, e.g. the quasi industry standard https://ptgui.com. PS has and keeps its good and indispensable place in 360° workflows as a pro image editing app. ... View more

there are two showstoppers here: the missing parts of your panorama are more or less featureless areas (sea and sky). the pattern recognition skills of the PS stitcher are giving up here. photoshop can't "think" around the 0°/360° border horizontally and cannot close the image poles at +/-90°. it simply thinks ". i've stitched a lot of  drone panos and recommend a professional stitcher like https://ptgui.com here. if you know the capturing pattern of your drone series, you can create a ptgui template for this and after a pre-positioning with suing the image meta data it will stitch these featureless areas way better than PS. ... View more

if i understand you right, you need a still frame from a 360° video as a (equirectangular) panorama photo. in this case, just open the 360° in quicktime or premiere and export the desired frame as JPEG. ... View more

do you mean 360° video footage from the insta? ... View more

did you try to test stitching in spherical vs. cylindrical mode? imho a 2-way correction on a spherical projection should work better than on a cylindrical projection. i'm not sure right now, but haven't time enough to test this. another way is to try a professional stitching app like https://ptgui.com. i'm doing perfectly aligned artwork stitches with it. ... View more

you may try the free jk2 plugin of https://www.fnord.com it works for PS, AE, and PR and on mac and windows ... View more

i've done some panoramas of this kind. what works best for me is a method that mimics a scanner use a tripod with the camera in portrait orientation move along the wall and try to keep the camera level and the lens axis perpendicular to the wall use a laser distometer to keep the distance between camera and wall as constant as possible to eliminate scaling problem in post. move along the wall with small increments. use the viewfinder grid to ensure the center 3rd of your frame overlaps with the next capture center 3rd. so you later get vertical strips, as you (kind of) "scan" along the wall. important: flatten out the images in LR using the correct lens profile important: crop all images to a vertical strip with 1/3 of the original width export the images as e.g. TIFFs and load them in PS as a stack then use PS auto align in reposition mode and see what you get. (do not stitch!) if it's okay, use auto blend to finalize the panorama if auto auto align returns garbage, manually position the single strips use rotation, scale, skew and free transform to optimize alignment use difference mode for fine adjustment of the layers if necessary if you're satisfied, use auto blend to finalize the panorama this workflow ensures an optimized source image set and a post production with automatics where useful and manual edits where necessary. ... View more

adobes stitching engine (CR, LR, PS) ... 1. isn't optimized for such workloads (RAM, swap space, GPU support etc.) 2. cannot think around the 360°/0° borders 3. can only think flat. so the +90°/-90° poles (zenith/nadir) cannot be created. head over to dedicated stitching apps like the industry standard https://ptgui.com ... View more

i also understand adobe removing all 3D features as they (maybe) try to re-focus in PS as the industry standard in image processing while there are better 3D tools out there that additionally offer smooth workflows to/from PS. for 360 editing (especially tripod removal) there are some alternatives @rayek.elfin mentioned affinity photo which imho does a better job with nadir retouching as PS did with its 3D functions. the most professional workflow is the interaction of PS with https://pano2vr.com where you can extract an arbitrary image section from a 360 equirectangular image, hand it over as a rectilinear patch to PS for editing, and reinsert it precisely and automatically after saving this patch in PS. this function is only one feature of a large toolkit (google street view export, virtual tour creation, image transformation/reprojection etc.). a feature-limited, but free alternative is https://nadirpatch.com. ... View more

tried it with a german prompt: »nachtwanderung bergsteiger felswand sterne milchstrasse gletscher schweiz kletterer« ... View more

a few days ago a client sent me some DNG from qoocam3 for inspection and i can confirm that the camera raw editing was 360° aware. thank you for your post, so i can check my insta360 for this ... ... View more

... {There does exist one other good panorama stitching tool I am aware of called PTgui / Hugin unfortunately that is based on open source and also hasn't been updated since the turn of the century. at this point you are most likely to give up on it and move on, because the spark of inspiration has been crushed by technicality}... By @Tosha187 sorry, but this is simply incorrect. indeed hugin is open source and has two differently paced development branches with the mac version being behind very much. but ptgui (it has originally the same roots as hugin) isn't open source and is under heavy development. ptgui is simply the panorama stitching industry standard and will help you with all your questions and problems.   ... View more

when it comes to video stitching, you should have a look at the mistika VR toolkits: https://www.sgo.es/mistika-vr ... View more

maybe it's a bug or at least a missing feature, but there's a simple workaround: you can add correct gpano metadata by using https://exiffixer.com works like a charm in such cases for me. ... View more

there's another thread with a similar question and you may have a look there for alternatives to the native PS 3D function for retouching spherical images: https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/retouche-image-panoramique-360/m-p/14440375 ... View more

it's not possible anymore in PS natively as @Kevin Stohlmeyer said. but there are alternatives, using the conversion of a spherical ("equirectangular") image to a cube with 6 faces, giving you a retouchable floor cube face for proper tripod removal. you can use the flexify PS plugin (http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify-for-removing-tripods.html) or the superrune PS plugin (https://www.superrune.com/tools/supercubic.php). while flexify is made for a lot of other stuff too, superrune is made especially for this purpose. 3rd party apps are affinity photo (https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/LiveProjection/equirectangular.html&title=Equirectangular%20projection) which has a spherical edit mode pretty similar to the old PS function. a pro tool for such use cases and a lot of other things is pano2vr (https://ggnome.com/pano2vr/) sporting a seamless PS integration for extracting any portion of a sphere, handing it over to PS, edit and re-insert it seamlessly into the sphere. ... View more

thank you, @Stephen Marsh , @c.pfaffenbichler  and @jazz-y for your hints and advices. i made some progress with simplifying my file and layer structure. a pretty interesting finding was that photoshop automatically updates SMO file paths in SMOs living in the top level of the layer stack. tests with moving projects to another folder and even transferring them from mac to windows are promising. i'll do some more tests and will report my results here. ... View more

yes, i found out where in the metadata part of a psd file the smSMOo file path is living. but unfortunately only  is valid for SMOs living on the top level of the layer stack. nested SMOs aren't visible there 😞 ... View more

thanks a lot for this hint, @jazz-y this is indeed my showstopper. i'll check this against ps cc 2023 which i've installed too. are you able to read the file binaries via JSX or do you need external tech here, like PHP or python? ... View more