Creating a planet out of ordinary photography

Many of you readers have probably seen some pretty planet photos like this on the web. One was featured on the cover of the previous issue of Photo & Technique. Such planets are usually made of full spherical panoramas with 360×180 degree coverage. But it is not easy to make such panorama, so we are going to show how to make almost a real “planet” from an ordinary photo that everyone has.

Creating a simple “planet” from an ordinary picture with the help of “Photoshop” editor Polar Coordinates filter .

1. Take any nice picture taken from a window, such as this. Open it in Photoshop.

2. Duplicate layer Ctrl+J . Activate the Transform tool Ctrl+T . Right click on any place of the picture and in the menu that appears press Flip Vertical. Then press Enter.

3. Call the Canvas Size menu Ctrl+Alt+C . In the Anchor section click on the left central square.

Enter in the cell Width “Width” the value of 200%, as shown in the screenshot.

4. Duplicate the layer Ctrl+J . Activate the Move tool by pressing the V button. Drag the picture to the right while holding down the left mouse button.

5. Activate the Transform tool Ctrl+T . Right click on any part of the image and in the menu that appears press Flip Horizontal. Then press Enter.

6. Now merge all visible layers Ctrl+Shift+E . Now we have a symmetrical image from an ordinary photo to replace the 360×180 panorama.

7. Stretch the image vertically by two times, for this press Ctrl+Alt+I, uncheck Constrain Proportions, enter the same value of image height, which is equal to its width, and press Enter.

8. Then apply the filter from the Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates menu to the obtained image. There is no need to change anything in the window. Press Enter. “The planet is ready! And although it’s a little different from the “real planet”, which is obtained from the full spherical panorama, but we’ve spent much less time and made it from an ordinary frame with simple Photoshop operations.

9. If we rotate the image by 30-45 degrees the overlap of the image we made at first will not be so noticeable. All that is left is to blur the edges.

Creating a “real planet”

The most beautiful “planets” are made of 360×180 degree spherical panoramas that is from the equidistant projections of full spheres . For subsequent minimization in the “planet” is better to use the plugin for Photoshop by Flaming Pear – Flexify 2. Compared to Polar Coordinates, it gives much more flexibility and variety of shapes, while being elementary easy to use.

Let’s see the details of the planet assembling on the example of panoramas from St. Petersburg and New York.

Panorama of St. Petersburg

1. Open the flat projection in Photoshop.

2. Open Filter > Flaming Pear > Flexify 2. To create a “planet” you first need to set the Input and Output values, as in the screenshot, or just press the button with the planet symbol upper left in the bottom group of nine buttons . Then just select the desired position of sliders, estimating the result in the preview window.

3. After all manipulations in the Flexify window, click OK. You get a “planet” like this.

4. At the end it can be trimmed along the edges and colored a little bit.

Panorama of Manhattan, New York

1. Open the flat projection in Photoshop.

2. Go to Filter > Flaming Pear > Flexify 2. To create a planet, you should first of all set the Input and Output values as shown in the screenshot, or just press the button with the planet symbol upper left in the bottom group of nine buttons . Then simply adjust the desired position of the sliders, evaluating the result in the preview window.

3. After doing all these things, press OK in the Flexify window. Here’s a fun “under-planet” like this.

Assembling a “planet” in PtGui

Progress is not standing still, and there are more advanced, more intelligent methods of panorama creation. PtGui is one of the best panorama software packages. You can also use PtGui to create a “planet”, and PtGui has great usability and flexibility in the final image format.

To create the “planet” we also use the equidistant projection. When exporting the panorama you have to specify the parameters of panorama used: type Equirectangular panorama and horizontal angle 360° . After that in the window Panorama Editor window with the preview, Ctrl+E you need to click on the icon with a drop-down menu of available views, where you choose Little Planet.

The resulting view of the “planet” can be changed by simply dragging and dropping it with the mouse on the Panorama Editor preview itself.

Then we need to save the resulting view of the “planet” in the desired resolution.

PHOTO: AirPano