Create a Circular Panoramic or “Planet” Image with this tutorial.

I visited a website today and saw a circular pano. I have seen them before but this was the first time I had actually “seen” one to the extent that I wondered how it was done. If you want to see what the rest of the web has to offer, use Google to search Circular Pano or pano Planet photo, etc.

Turns out, a little planning with your image and a quick run through a Photoshop filter and you are done. The trick is picking your image. Essentially you want to pick an image that is in landscape orientation, preferably a bit wider in aspect ratio than a typical 2 to 3 or 3 to 4. In the example below, the image is almost 1:2.

If you consider a flat piece of paper that is made into a cone shaped party hat you know you can bring one end over to the other and you have a cone. The original piece of paper is shaped almost like a triangle because the diameter at the top of the cone is smaller than the diameter near the base. If you warped an image into a triangle shape, printed it then made a party hat and stepped on it from the vertex ( top ) of the cone flattening it, then you would have a flat, circular pano or “planet” image.

Done in Photohsop, the computer will do the heavy lifting for you… To some extent… A few rules to ponder first.
First, remember that what is on the top of the image is going to wind up in the center of the completed image. For the typical planet image, you have your planet in the middle, and the sky on the outside. Thus you want the original image to be upside down. Sky on the bottom, “planet” on top and after the warp, your planet will be on the inside with the sky on the outside.
Second, you are in effect joining the right and left sides of the image. Because of this, you will want to make sure your horizon will be at the same level on the right and left sides of the image. Use your ruler tool and arbitrary rotation to accomplish this.

Download the action from the bottom of this page and play around with an image. You may copy my “start” image if you are looking for something to play with. I do not give you permission to post this image or any “planet” created from this image unless you include the following credit: “Photo by Paul Jaruszewski, www.melor.com”

The Circular Pano action set contains three actions. The first one takes your rectangular image and creates the circular pano. After the pano is displayed, you may want to crop the image. There are two options to crop. Circular which will leave you with a square image and the pano dead center. The second option makes a square image from the center of the circular pano. Try the circular crop first, then the square crop and see what you prefer!

Original Image

After editing the original image, initiate the “Create Circular Pano” action. The image below has also been processed by the circular crop action of the set. What you need to notice is that in the original, the building was on the bottom of the frame. In the pano, the building is on the exterior surface of the pano. Think party hat. I have cloned out the discrepancies in the clouds before posting this image.

Pano and Circular Crop

If we take the building image and rotate 180 degrees, the sky will be on the bottom. Activating the Create Circular Pano action will create an image like the one below ( also has had a Crop Circular action applied ).

Planet conversion from image with sky on the bottom.

If the image is uniform on the exterior surface like the conversion immediately above, you may want to perform a Crop Square on the image. The third action in the set will do this for you if you wish. Below is an example of the Crop Square action’s effects.

Square crop from the center of the circular pano.

I have created a gallery where I will display some of my circular panoramic photos.

Free to use or share. Please don’t re-post the action, but post a link to this page or my website. Email me to let me know if you like it!

Your feedback is the only compensation I want or need!