![]() Drag upwards on the line to create a curve, which will brighten the layer. Make a new Curves Adjustment Layer, and click the button at the bottom of the Curves dialog to use the layer beneath as a Clipping Mask. As we can see, the lighting is different on the two halves: we can fix that next. The aim is to blend the left and right images together. Using a soft-edged brush, paint in black on this mask to hide the edge. Move the new layer so that the paths coincide, and add a Layer Mask to the copied layer. The large tree in the center will be too dominant in the final result, so let’s hide it by joining those two paths so that they form a single element. Switch to the Move tool (V) and hold Alt/Option (to make a copy) and Shift (to drag horizontally), and drag the layer to make a duplicate. First, drag the merged image to one side so that the edge of the image appears in the center of the frame. The only problem with not using a 360-degree panorama is that the edges won’t match each other, but it’s easy enough to fix this. You should end up with a result something like this: If you have an earlier version of Photoshop, use the Clone Tool to sample and patch the missing areas from the surrounding region. Then hit Shift-Backspace and choose Content Aware Fill in the resulting dialog. Select them with the Magic Wand tool and go to Select > Modify > Expand to make the selection one pixel wider. If you have Photoshop CS5, you can use Content-Aware Fill to patch the missing portions. Photoshop then attempts to align, distort, and adjust all the images in order to combine them in a single seamless montage. Select Auto as the layout type, and press OK. Either open all your images in Photoshop and choose File > Automate > Photomerge, or select them in Adobe Bridge and choose Tools > Photoshop > Photomerge. When you can’t manage this, as I couldn’t–in one of the shots below, the tree goes off the top of the frame–you can fix it later in Photoshop. It’s important to try to get both the ground and the sky into every shot. But in real life, this isn’t always practical: There may be some ugly buildings on one side, or you may be standing so close to a wall that you can’t photograph the top of it. The ideal method is to take 360 degrees of photographs, to form a true panorama. The lesson here: Make sure feature elements aren’t too wide in the original photograph. They took up so much of the original picture that they’ve formed themselves into wedge shapes that instantly look wrong. The main problem, though, is the extent to which the tower on the left (and the clock tower itself) have been distorted. The horizontal line between the water and the buildings is just too dominant. The buildings wrap around in a circle well enough, but all those flat-on lower parts form a donut shape that detracts from the final appearance. Here’s the result after applying Polar Coordinates: ![]() There’s plenty of water in the foreground, which should make a good ground surface. It has a few buildings sticking up, and I’ve extended the boat and buildings to the right of the clock tower to make a seamless join. The lesson to be learned here is that these planetary images always look better when there’s some ground at the bottom of the original picture, since this forms the surface of the planet from which the buildings and other elements can spring. Despite the interesting array of buildings around the perimeter, the eye is immediately drawn to this high-contrast region. All the buildings converge on the center point, and the result is ugly. To prevent this sort of distortion, avoid images that include prominent circles, as they’re always going to look wrong. However, when I run the Polar Coordinates filter on that panorama, a couple of things are clearly wrong.įor a start, the London Eye has distorted into an ugly balloon-like shape. It’s composed of several images joined together, with buildings jutting up from the horizon, and the lit-up London Eye making a strong feature on the right. ![]() The shot below of London by night might seem a prime example for the planetary treatment. Let’s begin by looking at the sort of images that don’t work, before going on to an image that does. That’s because the massive distortion created by the Polar Coordinates filter places stringent requirements on the kind of image you can use. ![]() Shooting the original photographs is the hardest part of the job. It’s an impressive and novel way to view a landscape-visually, it shouldn’t work, but somehow it just does. We’re all familiar with panorama photography, and you may have used Photoshop’s excellent tools for combining a series of shots into a single, wide image.īut did you know you can take the process one step further? Using Photoshop’s Polar Coordinates filter, you’re able to turn that panorama into a miniature planet. ![]()
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