In the tutorial, I would like to share with you a few tips and tricks on how to improve your panoramic image quality from the laser scanner and how to use these images in unusual ways.

So first of all you need to know, that you could implement different filters and correct contrast, saturation, gamma, brightness, etc. directly in the Cyclone REGISTER 360 or Cyclone CORE. But you should notice that this tool works only with HDR images, thanks to RTC 360 all images are HDR 

For editing colors click the right mouse button on the setup in the tree view and choose:

• Edit HDR Image - REGISTER 360

• Tone Map Pano Image - Cyclone CORE

Alright, now the image looks much better, but what if:

1. you don’t have HDR information in your image

2. you'll need more tools to highlight all details in the image 

3. you would like to add some additional information on it. 

For that cases, you could export your image into an external raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing. I’ll be using GIMP software for that, cause it is free and open-source. But you could use photoshop or any other you liked. Ok, let’s export our panoramic image with the right mouse button, click on the current station and choose the Export Panoramic Images, and then export jpg. Also, you could select any number of stations and do all the same things for them at one time. Choose the destination folder and you’ll get your panoramic images in jpg format. 

Note! For export panoramic images you should have the Cyclone PUBLISHER PRO license.

Run the GIMP software and just drag and drop your image there. In the software, you’ll be able to do a lot of different stuff like adjusting colors, and tones, blending images, highlighting features, and details, adding additional information, and deleting redundant elements.

For instance, let’s correct colors and add navigation symbols and some text. When all corrections are done, save the current image in the same format as it was before (jpg). 

In REGISTER 360 right-click on the setup or bundle, choose the Re-Import Panoramic Images tool and select the folder that contains the panoramic images. 

In Cyclone CORE it’s called Import Panoramic Images

The naming must match the export name and the aspect ratio must be the same for successful re-import. Now you got adjusted panoramas with additional information, but don’t forget that the point cloud changes its colors based on these panoramas, therefore you could see unwanted effects in the point cloud, that’s why I recommend you add additional elements only in space without point clouds (like the sky, windows or dead space under the scanner). 

For Cyclone CORE the point clouds don't recolor by themself after you add a new panoramic image. To recolor them, you need to select the ScanWorld in the Navigator window and choose Batch Apply Multiimages with the right mouse button. If your ScanWorld includes more than one panoramic Multiimage, then you should select the exact image and click the same button (Batch Apply Multiimage)

Once we know that we can color the point clouds any color we want, we can use this feature for additional scenarios. Let's imagine that we have colored all the elements in the panoramas in the color corresponding to the element layer. This is a kind of manual classification. After importing these images into REGISTER 360, we ended up with a hand-colored point cloud. Now we can segment it by color in Cyclone 3DR with one click. Using a segmented point cloud greatly speeds up and simplifies your entire project digitizing process.