The snow came down this weekend, and the grounds of the museum made perfect conditions for doing such a panoramic.   So I grabbed my tripod and headed out to the grounds to finally work on my shot.  I wanted to do something slightly different, so instead of using a single 360 degree shot, I took 2 and put one inside the other.  And this is the tutorial on how I did that so that you can make your own panoramic as well.

Step 1.  Take a series of shots for your panoramic

Grab your trusty tripod and find a good spot.  Pan across the scene taking a shot every 15 degrees or so.   Make sure your photos will merge together well on the left and right sides.  And you also want to pick something with a neutral top and bottom portion of the scene.  This will make cleaning up areas later on much easier.

Step 2. Stitch your photos together

In Photoshop goto “File” > “Automate” > “Photomerge”.  This will present you with a dialog to select all of the individual photos that you want to make up your panoramic image.  The defaults should work just fine for what we want.

Step 3. Merge and Cleanup

Each image will be an individual layer in your newly merged shot.  Hit Ctrl + E (windows) or Apple + E to merge your layers into 1 single layer.  This will make working with your image more manageable.

You will most likely have some blank space in the corners and around the edges of your photo.  Select the Rectangle Marquee tool, right click on your image and select “Free Transform”.  Now right click again and select “Warp”  Use this tool to pull out the corners and fill the entire canvas with the image.

Step 4. Stretch and invert

In order to polarize your panoramic, your image needs to be a perfect square.  Goto “Image” > “Imagesize”.  Uncheck “Constrain Proportions” and set the “Height” to the same value as your width.  You should end up with something like this:

Step 5: Invert

If you are only using a single image and not merging 2 images, you would always complete this step.  In my case I am only going to invert the number sculpture as I want to put one image inside of the other.

Click on “Image” > “Image Rotation” > “Flip Canvas Vertical”  and you will get:

Step 6: Polarize

Yup, this is where you start to see your panoramic take shape.  Click on “Filter” > “Distort” > “Polar Coordinates” and make sure you select “Rectangular to Polar”.  Now your images will look like this:

Step 7: Merge the 2 panoramics

Now we need to put one image inside of  the other.  Copy the first image to your clip board.  Then open up your second image and hit paste.  Drag the new layer so that its below the larger image.  Use the Rectangle Marquee Tool to re-size and rotate your image so that it fits nicely in the middle of the larger image.

Step 8: Cleanup

Chances are you will have some empty space where the circle meets itself.  In my photo this happened at points with trees which tend to be really easy to fix.  I just used the lasso tool, Selected part of the trees and pasted those into the blank areas to fill in the space.  You could also use the clone tool to touch up these areas as well

Step 9: Fill in the blanks

Our final step is to fill in the rest of the whitespace.  In my photo the background is solid white so this one is pretty easy.  We’ll just add a white background to fill out the area along the edges.  If you have a textured background you could utilize the clone tool to fill in these areas as well.

And thats it!  Now you have created your first Polar Panoramic Image.  Make sure to share your panoramics at the IMA Flickr Group.

I use a great tool called AutoStitch to create these panoramas from individual photos. You just have to manually adjust your focus and exposure and then rotate in place while shooting away. As long as there’s some overlap between shots and the lighting is consistent, it does a pretty good job of merging photos automatically. For this scene, I had to stitch a few groups independently and then stitch those mini-panos into the full panorama. You can see above that the lighting had changed due to shifting clouds and the complexity of the bushes even thwarted my own pattern matching capability. The photos that I took a few weeks ago stitched a little more easily and capture a more cheerful vista.

That’s not the end of my tale, however. I continued walking around the lake, expecting that I would be able to make a full revolution because the weather had been pleasant for quite a while and I had been watching our stream gauge reading drop daily in anticipation of a nice stroll. Unfortunately, when I got to the inlet that connects the river with the lake, I found that I wouldn’t be able to ford it while keeping myself dry below the knees. Not unless I had an olympic-class long jump.

You can now learn some basic geology about the White River and 100 Acres on the IMA website, thanks to our collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey. There’s still more information to come about floods and we’re also looking into adding some guidelines that will help IMA staff and visitors determine when the park is flooded.

From what I’ve learned, the inlet is more complicated – the water level there depends on the amount of water flowing in the river, the amount of water that has entered (from both the river and precipitation) and exited the lake, and the rate of evaporation. If we can solve that puzzle we’ll be able to determine when it’s possible to hike all the way around the lake. For now, just keep in mind that even after a few days of fair weather the inlet may be too wide to cross without getting wet.

Photosynth screen capture showing the Asian Gallery at the IMA

As you read on, you’ll probably discover that I had way too much fun with this tool, and I hope you will as well.

I tried three separate experiments.

#1: Staged Photography

First, I asked Mike Rippy, from our photography department, to shoot a variety of overview and detail shots of a portion of our Asian Galleries.  These images all have consistent lighting and were shot using a tripod, so they are extremely sharp.  The image above shows a case of works, and the faint white box is indicating that a more detailed image was shot at that point.  Photosynth does the best it can to “automagically” stitch together photographs of the same region even if they were shot at different angles.  For the most part it did an amazing job.

Zoom Detail Example

In the image above I am showing two captures of the same view in Photosynth.  On the left half you see the overview of a hanging scroll.  As you zoom in with your mousewheel, more and more detail comes to life as seen the in right half.  This ability to see pristine detail on works of art is very seldom seen.

Automatic Object VR

Another reason I see this tool as taking panoramic tools to the next level is its automatic object vr detection.  When taking pictures of a 3D work from multiple angles, Photosynth displays the “donut” control above.  You can grab and turn the object, and new images page in and out to give the feeling that you are spinning the work in space.

#2: The Mob

As a second test I asked a group of people to help me raid the European Galleries.  About a dozen people took 30 minutes to shoot over 1400 images of the space.  The point of this test was to see if Photosynth could handle photographs from a wide variety of cameras.  They ranged from your $100 point-and-shoot to your $1000 digital SLR.  For the most part it handled the task fairly well.  The final product, which I link to below, consisted of about half of the images due to the large amount of time it took to create.

#3: Nature

Finally I shot a more traditional panorama in the 100 Acres.  Photosynth did a really good job stitching these photos together as well.  I thought the complexity of nature might pose a difficult task.

100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park

The Results:

You can see all three of the Photosynth’s I created at these links:

• Asian Galleries
• European Gallery
• 100 Acres

Did I mention they are embeddable?