manningtree

I had some fun making this picture of Seattle’s water front, as seen from West Seattle, thanks to Dirk’s article on Photojojo. It was pretty easy using ICE and Photoshop…

Here’s the steps:

1. Take some pictures. For this I used a set of snaps of the downtown Seattle skyline from across the bay in West Seattle.

   

2. Stitch them together to build the panorama. For this I used the Image Composite Editor (ICE) from Microsoft Research

   

   Which resulted in a rather large TIFF file – 24,101 x 2890 pixels. But only because I was being excessive…

3. Clean up in Photoshop by cloning the sky and cropping out the water to compensate for the poor job I did aligning successive frames when taking the pictures (note to self, next time use a tripod or find a flat surface to rest the camera on)

   

4. Compensate for the change in cloud cover because if we just wrap the scene difference in cloud density and texture from left to right results in a noticeable join. To compensate I masked out the buildings; grabbed some cloud from the left; flipped and stretch and placed behind the buildings on the right; then used a gradient mask to blend into the original sky.
   Here’s the sky at the right end of the panorama before (left) and after (right) the compensation:

     
   

5. Convert to polar coordinates by
   1. first resizing to a square image (Image | Resize… ensuring constrain proportions is off)
   2. flipping vertically
   3. and then using the Polar filter (Filter | Distort | Polar Coordinates…) to convert to polar coordinates and get the wrapped circular effect
6. Tweak using the imaging tool of your choice.

Enjoy.