Remove RICOH THETA Image Red Dots in 5 Seconds with this Great GIMP Plug-in

An enthusiastic community member recently told me how to remove the red dots on THETA image in seconds with the free software GIMP. While I’ve known about this technique for a while, this is the first time that I used the Heal Selection and Resynthesizer plug-in technique.

Like many of you, I’ve been living with the red dots.

However, with a quick selection and Heal, I easily eliminated the dots.

You can barely see the healed spot in the THETA image viewer at maximum zoom. This is with default settings.

Steps

Open THETA in GIMP. Use 100% zoom or greater. Use the ellipse selection tool to select the red dot.

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Press delete key.

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Select Filters → Enhance → Heal selection

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For this test, I used the default settings.

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Results were good.

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For different backgrounds, you may need to use the blur tool to blur the outline. To test a fast workflow, I only applied the heal and did not apply an edge blur.

Export to jpg.

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Inspect results in THETA desktop viewer.

Be free of the red dots!

Installing Gimp Plug-ins

I did not have the plug-ins on my default GIMP installation. To get these useful plug-ins, I installed the GIMP Extensions Pack for Windows.

On Debian-based Linux systems like Ubuntu, you can install the gimp-plugin-registry package with apt install gimp-plugin-registry

If you want more information about the plugin prior to installing it, you can use apt-cache search or apt-cache show for details.

~$ apt-cache search gimp-plugin-registry
gimp-plugin-registry - repository of optional extensions for GIMP

~$ apt-cache show gimp-plugin-registry |grep resyn
Replaces: gimp-refocus (<< 0.9.0-2), gimp-resynthesizer, gimp-save-for-web
Provides: gimp-resynthesizer, gimp-save-for-web
Breaks: gimp-refocus (<< 0.9.0-2), gimp-resynthesizer (<< 0.16-2~), gimp-save-for-web
   * resynthesizer (2.0): Resynthesizer

Information on Mac OS X is here:

http://gimp.lisanet.de/Website/Download.html

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Hi, @codetricity, Have you enjoyed RICOH THETA V Plug-in Microconference? I wish I could be there.

GIMP is great tool to make perfect Street View images. I use the latest stable version “GIMP 2.10.6”. (Windows 10 64bit)

Here are some of my workflows with using GIMP and Pano2VR Patch mode.

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Equirectangular stitched Ich Hirota’s original Dual-Fisheye plugin images by PTGui pro ver.11.6. You can see some errors and objects to be touched.

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Start using patch mode of Pano2VR Ver.6 beta3. 1) Select the area and set aspect ratio. 2)Type; image, Format; .psd 3) Click Extract to cut off
**GIMP can edit .psd file(Photoshop).

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Open the patched file with GIMP and edit it!

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Overwrite it and Pano2VR will automatically load the patched file. It is OK!

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I used Smart delete(スマート消去) plugin(resynthesizer) to remove the
tripod shadow.

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Removing Red Ball(紅玉) is very easy. Just select it with a little bit larger circle. We call such kind of lens flare “Red Ball(or 紅玉)” ,instead of “Red dots”.

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It’s better to use clone tool after doing smart delete to avoid incompatibility.

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In this case, clone tool is more useful and easier to repair.

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I can’t completely avoid all the stitching errors during the workflow of PTGui and Dual-Fisheye images. I’ve tried “Cage Transform” tool with GIMP 2.10.6. It successfully worked well for me.

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Lift up! Errors have disappered.

You can enjoy my Google Street View again.

Hope this helps,
Toyo

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