Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

5.4. Stage 4

5.4.1. "Spherizing" the panorama

There are several ways to wrap your panorama around a sphere. How you do it will depend on your software and your computer's processing power.

The simplest method is to use Photoshop. Open the image and go to Image→Rotate Canvas→180°. Enlarge the canvas so that you get a square document, and align the bottom of the panorama along the top edge of the canvas. Then apply the Polar Coordinates filter (Filter→Distort→Polar Coordinates), choosing the Rectangular to Polar option.

The Polar Coordinates filter produces a decent result, but the image is now much smaller.

The size of the final image is greatly limited by the computer's horsepower, which I find very frustrating. This is especially true if you only have Photoshop; it's really hard to produce a big enough file (6 × 6 in. at 300 dpi).

As an alternative to Photoshop's filter you can use the Flexify filter from Flaming Pear, which produces better results but is more complicated to use.

Personally, I use 3ds max, which has a lot of calculating power and lets me produce 20 × 20-in. files at 300 dpi, which is nothing to sneeze at. But any 3D software will do the trick. All you have to do is project the image produced by Stitcher onto a half sphere or a flat surface (using the deformation in polar coordinates) and launch the recalculation.

Fill the fourcorners with sky.

Add texture.

Retouch the center and add to the image.

Check the sky color balance and add texture where necessary