A few people have asked how to make a 360 panoramic image like this one. It’s pretty easy really, but fiddly to take the pictures right in the first place. I think there’s a few different approaches, but here’s what I do.
First you need to make a normal panoramic picture. I do this by stitching together lots of images in Stitcher Express. Photoshop lets you do this too, but I find it’s not quite as good as Stitcher.
When you’re taking the photos you need to make sure the full panorama has space above and below the main objects you’re aiming to show. In this case I couldn’t have any of the buildings being cut off at the bottom or top of the frame. It’ll work a lot better if the content above and below the main object is more like a texture as it’ll blend in on itself. Sky works well at the top and in this case, snow at the bottom. Grass, gravel, concrete, carpet would work too.
Don’t make the panoramic picture too wide and short or else the final picture will be too distorted (this is where I went wrong the first time with this one). It’s best to shoot the pictures in portrait mode to get extra height. I did the these at 10mm in portrait.
The flat panorama needs to wrap round on itself exactly. Stitcher helps you do this, though the actual UI to do it isn’t obvious. It will work if you can’t get it quite right, but you may end up with a noticeable join in the final picture. The finished flat panorama for the image above looked like this. As you can see, none of the buildings go out of frame at the top or the bottom.
Once you’ve done that you need to open it up in Photoshop. Now make the image into a square. Resize the image, turn maintain proportions off and make the shortest side the same length as the longest one. Make sure the image isn’t too big or the next steps will take a long time, unless you have a much more powerful machine than me. I aim for less than 5000*5000 pixels. Scale it down if you need to.
Next rotate the image by 180 degrees (this is really important or you’ll end up with weird results).
Now the nifty bit. Apply a Polar Coordinates Filter (it’s under the Filter-Distort menu). Set it to “Rectangular to Polar”, leave any other options as they are and press apply.
You may find that some bits (especially near the outer edge and centre) don’t look quite right. You need to use the clone brush to tidy these up. Once that’s done rotate it as much as you need to do to make it look good. The main focus point being at 12 o’clock seems to work best. That’s pretty much it.
Brilliant - Been after a decent stitching app for Macs for ages! Half-heartedly admittedly - not enough to actually look very hard, but you know…. Thanks!
Comment by Ed — March 6, 2008 @ 11:08 amHeh, yeah Stitcher isn’t too bad. It’s not got the best UI, but it does the job.
Comment by Darren Shaw — March 6, 2008 @ 11:30 amMaybe I’m being dumb here, but I don’t see a picture here?!?!?
Check out Panorama Factory. It allows you to create a 360 panorama and export to Quicktime so you can drag the image around.
Comment by Graham White — March 13, 2008 @ 5:28 pmOK, browser caching problems seem to be the culprit.
Comment by Graham White — March 13, 2008 @ 5:30 pmI’ve not tried Stitcher. I bought Calico a few weeks ago (which is essentially Autostitch-for-the-Mac) and really like it. I’ll try Stitcher too though.
Comment by Roo Reynolds — April 26, 2008 @ 11:23 pm