Creating Your Own Little Planet

[ohfour]

I posted this earlier in another section, but a number of people have asked how I did it so I thought it'd be a good idea to put some more details in here. Hopefully that's alright!



The basic process for turning a 360° panorama into a planet is simple and this tutorial covers it pretty well, however I still ran into a couple of issues when I attempted it myself:

The Warped Center of the Earth

I don't have a particularly wide angle lens (28.8mm is my widest) so I couldn't easily capture the whole scene from pole to pole (i.e. the resulting panorama didn't have 180° vertical coverage). This meant that when I used the polar coordinates filter, the center of my 'planet' ended up looking as if it were being sucked into a black hole. Not cool.

Luckily it's easily fixed.

I simply took some extra photos of the ground I had been standing on when I made the panorama (after moving my tripod, obviously!) and then used those to rebuild the ground after applying the polar coordinates filter.

Mismatched Exposures at Each End of the Panorama

I made the panorama for this shot shortly before sunset, which meant that the light was changing quickly as I took the photos. To prevent the sun from dropping too much while I had my back turned, I simply alternated the side that I took each photo from as I worked my way back. The second photo was slightly to the right of the first, the third slightly to the left, etc.

The result is that instead of finishing where I started, but two minutes later and with different light, I finished pointing directly away from where I started and with no sudden changes in exposure to worry about.

Beyond those two things, it was just a matter of applying a little bit of lovin' in Photoshop until I had the effect I was looking for.

Have fun :-) Follow these instructions and it'll be no time at all before we all have our own little planets and the effect becomes totally kitsch! :-p

[Silverz]

I always wondered how you did this efect, I will have to give it a try now

[jrgarcia619]

wooooo hooooo thanks for sharing this! I've wanted to do this for a while. :0)

[inkista]

Very nice!! Especially the exposure and the nadir-patching! It's always a lot harder to get these to look good when you're not using a 360°x180° as your starting point.

[Harksie Photos]

That's really cool. I'm gonna give it a try. Really cool capture. Thanks for the tutorial.