Panorama Planets

[Nicole]

I was reading about this technique over in the Technique group on Flickr (http://flickr.com/groups/technique/discuss/72157594368629002/). Basically, in 3 steps you can take a panorama and turn it into a little planet :) The thread on Flickr has much better examples than I was able to come up with. Anyways...

1. Take a panorama picture (or crop a normal picture so it's more like a panorama)
2. In your photo editing program of choice change the image size so that the height is equal to the width (in Photoshop Image -> Resize Image -> Deselect the checkbox for maintaining the proportions -> type the same number for height that is there for width)
3. Rotate the picture by 180 degrees.
4. Use the Distort -> Polar Coordinates filter and just use the default settings.

You might have to clone some stuff to make the edges meet up so they don't look strange. This was about the best I could do based on the landscape of Wellington, but I still thought it was a fun little photoshop project :p

http://static.flickr.com/199/464789661_0e4ab2bcca.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicolesphotos/464789661/)

[rikkersc]

This does look like a fun little "project". Seeing your photo has given me a few ideas of my own that I am now eager to try out.
I will have to try this and see how it works out. Thanks for the new ideas!:)

It would also be interesting to see the orginal photo to compare how different it is to the photoshopped one.

[Nicole]

This is the original picture:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicolesphotos/165200125/" title="Goodnight Wellington... (by -Nicole-)"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/72/165200125_2cfc683428.jpg" title="Goodnight Wellington... (by -Nicole-)" alt="Goodnight Wellington... (by -Nicole-)" width="500" height="333" /></a>

[rikkersc]

Wow, very cool. I would have never suspected that is what the original looked like.
It's amazing what fun little things you can find to do with photos. :)

[inkista]

To avoid the seaming problem, you could start with a 360-degree pano stitched together from several photos. But it's even more fun if you start with an equirectangular projection of a spherical pano and do a stereographic (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/StereographicProjection.html) projection, especially since it's now built into Hugin. :D

Original equirectangular:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/107/311431548_2c98cf5372.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/inkista/311431548/)

With stereographic mapping, becomes:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/248/462436131_f4e7a3d7aa.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/inkista/462436131/)

If you want to see a master of remapping, take a look on Flickr at Seb Przd's photostream (http://flickr.com/photos/sbprzd/).

[Nicole]

Wow, great example inkista, and Seb Przd has some fantastic shots! Thanks for pointing those out. Needless to say, yours turned out much better than mine :)

(And yes, had I actually had a decent picture for it, I know I would've avoided the seaming problem :p ;))

[inkista]

Hey, it still looks cool. Very Little Prince-y. ;)

I love pano stitching, which inevitably led me to the whole spherical thing. But it's definitely not for everybody. Seb Przd's amazing--his images all started out as hand-held point-and-shoot photos that he stitched together with open-source software (Hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net/)). There's no way I would have gotten into it, if I'd started that way.

My favorite cubic/spherical/qtvr panorama links are:

panoramas.dk (http://www.panoramas.dk)
panamundo's how to (http://www.panomundo.com/panos/howto/index.html)
panoguide (http://www.panoguide.com/)
the panorama tools wiki (http://wiki.panotools.org/)

[tekla]

I'm overwhelmed with so much beautiful little planets posted on the net, the tutorial seemed easy that I just had to try it. BUT I had nothing near to a panorama shot to start with :eek:!

So I played around with a quick snapshot of my son's sixth grade class after a mangrove tree planting trip, and a landscape he took then. I am soooo new at photo editing but I just had to do the fun stuff, I promise myself I'll learn the basics later :).

Considering the input, I'm pretty happy with my output :D. I hope the class appreciates it, my son does!

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/10397592@N04/900373766/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1237/900373766_96c52ffddd.jpg" width="500" height="500" alt="sixth-grader's little planet" /></a>


EDIT: where did that purple frame come from? how do i get rid of it?

[katherine]

A bit of fun with a panorama of the Vltava River and the Charles Bridge in Prague.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/39183541@N00/968541899/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1015/968541899_9d7ee8b202.jpg" width="500" height="496" alt="Global Fantasy" /></a>

I was intrigued when I saw this technique and thought I'd give it a try. The first couple I tried had very prominent seams where the edges of the original panorama joined. Being lazy and not wanting to do heavy duty cloning to clean it up, I decided to try this to take care of the messy seams. First I make a duplicate of the original panorama, rotated it horizontally and saved. Next I stitched the two together using automate and photo merge making a double panorama. Then following Nicole's excellent instructions, I created this fantasy.

Prague, Czech Republic

July 2007

[Nicole]

Looks great katherine, and what an excellent way to get rid of the annoying seams :)

[katherine]

Nicole -

Thanks for the inspiration. Glad you like what I did.

Katherine

[xxpinballxx]

Well obviously the stitche pan shots will ge ta much more desirable result than simply cropping and resizing since doing so stretches the image out of shape a bit.
I got to get into the panoramas a little and give it a try.
I'm trying to figure out what Inksta was talking about and the technique used there?