How to: Polar Panorama

[gtuned]

I haven't seen many people doing this, but it's pretty simple, so i figured i'd write up a tutorial.

When Taking the pictures, always overlap your edges a bit, make sure to level out your camera with each turn, and turn on AE Lock so your pictures don't change brightness. And most importantly, the Picture has to be 360 Degrees, so you go in a circle with the camera completely.

The most important thing about polar panoramas, is the space.
You want to have at least 25% of the top and bottom to be Empty Space. You also have to make sure that there is space between an object and the top of the picture. there always has to be sky or ground on the bottom or top of the picture. If anything touches the edge, you can get wierd lines in the finished product.

Stiching is next. There's various ways to stitch panoramas, but what i use is free and works pretty well, Windows Live Photo Gallery An easy way to do this is create an empty folder in your pictures, name it Panorama pictures or whatever, and copy the pictures into it. Open the Windows Live Photo Gallery, and find the folder on the left. Select your pictures, then select Make, then Panoramic Photo.

It'll automatically stitch the pictures together and ussually give a good result. Save the picture and you're closer to being done.

If you get bent and rounded pictures with black, you did it wrong ! Okay.. no you didn't panoramas do that. So, Open your panorama in your editing program, and crop out the black. make sure to get end to end of the picture, aslong as you get no black. Here's where it can get tricky.

Resize your picture to make it a square. say your panorama is 5678x1234. Resize it to be 1234x1234.
Then Flip the image upside down. With the picture resized and flipped, find an effect named "Polar Coordinates"

With my program, Corel Paint Shop Pro X2, make sure Rectangular to Polar is checked, and set edge mode to repeat. And with that, your Polar Panorama is done. Flip it again and adjust it to your liking, and stamp out the line if you get one. So post yours up and share any comments or questions, i'll try to help.
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[franz]

Nice tutorial! It really helps other people who are not familiar to polar panorama, obviously for those haven't done such photography in real life. I agree the top and bottom section of the panorama to be empty-spaced. It is so much easier than you have lots of texture on the ground. However complex ground texture is not a big deal in GT5 if you are good at Photoshop, because the photomode camera can face absolute downward, which you can get a perfect image to cover the bad polar distortion.

I have done this is GT4, but it distorted so badly when using wider angle. Here is my result: Planet Venecia

 

[gtuned]

Thanks Franz, but i guess it was kinda pointless to write the whole thing up...