Spherical Panoramas

This is two examples of spherical panoramas that I created in my G.T. class. A spherical panorama is basically a distorted panorama that becomes a circular image with the earth outlining the edge of the circle. If you don't know, a panorama is a set of vertical images taken in a 360 degree rotation with the central horizon which is then merged.

To make these spherical panoramas we had to first choose a great spot to take pictures that has an interesting horizon line. Then, we had to make the horizon line straight and move in a 360 degree circle in a vertical shots with 10-15 pictures that all have an overlap on each other. Next, we uploaded, edited, and organize photos in Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw. Then we resized and rotated the photos in a perfect square. Then we flipped the photos upside down by going up to the menu options, image, image rotation, rotate, 180 degree. After that we had the last step to do, go up to the menu option and press Filter, distort, Polar Coordinates & Edit!

After doing the two worlds, we had a photo session and had to take portrait photos of us showing how we would feel if we were on those worlds. After editing the portrait photos, we used the Quick Selection Tool to cut out the background, refine the edges and resize the layer to fit their polar panorama perfectly. The last step was to make shadows. To make the shadows we, inverted and warped our portrait layer, decreased the exposure to pure black and adjusted the opacity to around 40%. That is how my G.T. class and I created our own little worlds.