From A Different Angle

When the weather’s so bad that you can’t go out to shoot pictures, you have to find other things to occupy your mind with.
I sometimes go to places where I can make my own weather. My good friend Photoshop has helped me several times to create my own little planet. With good weather.

My own personal planet, with good weather

It doesn’t work with all images, but if you have the right image, you can make something fun out of it.
You need a panorama for it (don’t tell Middleton! 😀 ). The best would be a 360° panorama, but with some tweaking a bit smaller would work just as well.

It’s a pretty painless process with only 5 steps:
1. Open your image in Photoshop
2. Make sure that the left and right side of your picture line out, i.e. if you have for example a city scape with buildings, make sure that the building on the left side is equally high to that on the right side, or if you have a water scene, make sure that the water on the left side of your picture is on the same height as on the right side. Use the guides (you can pull them from the rulers on the top of the screen, View – Rulers or Ctrl+R if they don’t show) to check if your image lines up.

Line up the ends of your image

3. Make the image as high as it is wide (Image – Image size). Don’t forget to uncheck the box “Constrain proportions”.

Height = Width

4. Rotate your image 180°, so it’s upside down (Image – Rotate Canvas – 180°). It will also work if you don’t rotate it, but then you will have the sky in the wrong place. Try it out and see what happens. It gives funny effects some times.

Rotate your image 180°

5. Apply the filter Polar Coordinates (Filter – Distort – Polar Coordinates). Check “Rectangular to Polar” if it’s not already selected.
Make sure that your color mode is set to 8 bit, other wise this filter doesn’t work.

Apply the filter"Polar Coordinates"

Select "Rectangluar to Polar" if it's not already selected

Click ok when you’re done and voilà, you have your own little planet (the voilà might take awhile, depending on the speed of your computer)!