World of Sam
September 1, 2009 at 11:46 am
filed under Photography
Creating ‘little planet’ style panoramas has become quite the popular thing to do of late, and with examples such as this and this it isn’t hard to see why.
Not wanting to miss out on the fun, I decided I’d have a go at creating my own little planet. As it turns out, converting a 360° panorama into a little planet is a simple process and this tutorial covers it pretty well – however I still ran into a couple of issues when I tried it myself:
I don’t have a particularly wide angle lens 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 twisted the panorama into a circle, the bottom was stretched until each side met at the center of the “planet”, resulting in an ugly warped section right at the center of the image:
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, of course!) and then used those to rebuild the ground at the center of the image after applying the polar coordinates filter in Photoshop.
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 (click to see it larger)
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 
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