21 Creating your own planet

Make sure the bottom of your picture has some open ground or a mostly solid color so that the bottoms of the buildings don’t come to a point in the middle of your planet. Write which tools you used and what they did.

First we have to crop the image as needed and straighten it to make the horizon absolutely horizontal. Using the cropping tool of PhotoShop we can do both processes in one step:

First we must make sure that our crop window is parallel to the horizon. This image shows how you can do this:

Choose the crop tool of PhotoShop and select a flat rectangular area of the photo. Move the cursor just outside of an edge of the marked area where the cursor changes into two arrows pointing left and up. Click the mouse button and you can rotate the cropped area.

By moving the top border to the horizon of the photo you can exactly inspect the rotation. Move and rotate the crop window until the top border and your horizon is parallel, but don’t activate the crop yet. Good. Now we have a selection that is horizontal.

Now we want to make sure the left and the right border of the image fit together. Using the same trick we now look for areas on the right and the left where the buildings have the same height:

Move the right and left borders as desired. Then finally move the top and bottom border in order to have the waterline roughly in the middle of the cropped photo:

Double click the image and you are ready for the transformation!

Step 1: Convert the photo into a square image

From here everything works like in the simple sample: Use the Photo|Image Size menu item to change the image size into a large square. Uncheck ‘Constrain Proporties’ and set the “height” value to the same value as your “width” value.

Step 2: Rotate by 180° and apply the polar effect

Now rotate the photo by 180 degrees and apply the “Filter|Distort|Polar Coordinates” filter (choose the “Rectangular to Polar” setting). If you are a user of The Gimp the command is “Filters->Distorts->Polar Coords”.

Step 3: Rotate and clean up

Again, the rest is just a little digital darkroom work.