Tutorial - Retouching a Cube Face

This tutorial shows how to extract a cube face and retouch it in an image editing application such as Photoshop.

Step 1

With a cubic movie loaded into CubicConverter (either a fresh conversion or a movie that you have imported) click the tab to go to the Cube Faces area.

Then click one of the cube faces on the Cube Control to show the image for that face.

Step 2

Drag the cube face out by clicking the mouse on the image, holding, and dragging it out to your Finder desktop or a folder on disk.

Step 3

Open this image and edit it in your normal image editing application, such as Photoshop. Using various tools it is usually possible to remove any artifacts or blemishes from the image that were present in the original photographs.

It is beyond the scope of this tutorial to cover all the intricacies of a tool such as Photoshop's Rubber Stamp tool, but essentially retouching involves cloning an intact part of the image onto the blemished area. If you are new to using the Rubber Stamp tool, follow this sequence to get the feel for it:

Click its palette icon to choose the Rubber Stamp tool, then hold down the OPTION key while clicking on an intact part of the image. Let go of OPTION, then brush the tool over the damaged area. Repeat "picking up" another area of the image (using OPTION) and cloning it over the bad part (by brushing), until you have removed most of the artifact(s).

Step 4

Once you have retouched your image, save it disk. (Usually, you could just type command-S to save the file in the original location you extracted the image to.)

Now drag the file back onto the cube face image in CubicConnector.

(If the window is obscured, you can also drag the image onto CubicConverter's Dock icon in Mac OS X, or the normal application icon in Mac OS 8/9. You can also manually select the image by clicking the "Choose Image..." button above the image in the Cube Faces area.)

Step 5

Now click the "Convert" button again to reassemble the movie to include the new cube face.

You will be taken back to the Movie area to preview the new movie. Now when you look straight down, you should see a more coherent ground.

The same sequence of steps could also be used to place a company logo over the tripod area. You may want to do this if the obscured area is very large.

Watch Movie of Tutorial Being Performed  [1:27]

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