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Photoshop Tutorial: Creating Planets

By T. Al Nakib.

Difficulty: Beginner.

* This tutorial was made using PS CS3.

This tutorial will show you the simple technique of creating globes out of your panoramic landscape/architecture photos.

1. Use a landscape photo with a preferable plain foreground such as plains or bodies of water. I am using a photo of the Kuwait pskyline. As you can see from the photo, the foreground is of the sea. In addition, panoramic photos (even if they’ve been stitched together) provide the best results, I am using a photo with a non-panoramic aspect ratio of 4:3.



2. Any object that spans the width of your photo (such as a skyline of buildings) should have its right and left edges at the roughly same height.



3. Since the photo I am using for this tutorial is not a panorama, I will crop some of the top and bottom parts (see above image).



4. Now with the cropped photo resembling a panoramic one, go to Image>Image Size…



5. When you get to the Image Size dialog window, make sure that “Constrain proportions” is not selected. Then change the height of the photo to equal its width. As you can see from the above image, the width of the photo is 300 pixels, so I changed its height to equal the width. This will distort the photo by vertically stretching it. We need to do this as step #7 works best with square (width equals height) images.



The above image is what I ended up with.



6. Rotate your photo by 180 degrees by going to Image>Rotate Canvas>180°.



7. Now go to Filter>Distort>Polar Coordinates. Make sure that “Rectangular to Polar” is selected in the dialog window and then hit “OK”.

And here’s the final result:

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