"Little World" using a Panorama

At times photos mean the world to us. 

The Little World effect is a Photoshop trick and can be created using any photograph. Although generally a panoramic image generally results in a more dramatic Little World. Lets have a lok how you can create your own Little World using Photoshop.

First, we take a panorama. For making one yourself, let us first understand that the basic concept of a panorama is simple, but making a seamless one can be tricky at times. Here is how I did:

- Camera On Tripod (you can do it handheld too, if you are in bright daylight or if you get nice shutter speed so that there is no camera shake).

- Manual focus, Manual Mode to control aperture, shutter, ISO, focal length and focus point.

- Take series of shots horizontally, making sure that you take next image overlapping 40-50% to the previous image.

- Start Photoshop and open the Mini Bridge.

- Browse the images and select all of them using CTRL (Win) or Command (Mac), right click and select Reveal In Bridge.

- Go to TOOLS> Photoshop> Photomerge

- This way you make sure that your edges align well in Photoshop stitching.

Now on how to turn this pan into a small world or a little world panorama, 



STARTING SIMPLE:
It’s simplest to work with a 360 degree panorama, so let’s start with this panorama shot. 

STEP 1: RESIZE AND ROTATEThe first thing we need to do is prepare the image for the Polar filter. We do this by stretching the height of the image so that the image is a perfect square.
Select Image>Image Size from the menus. Uncheck ‘Constrain Proporties’ and set the “height” to the same value as your “width”. Next, rotate the image 180 degrees. (Image>Rotate Canvas>180)
You should end up with something like the image to the right.

STEP 2: APPLY THE POLAR FILTERNext, we’ll apply the Polar Filter to wrap our image into a sphere.
Choose Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates from the menus and in the resulting dialog box, select the “Rectangular to Polar” setting.
(If you’re using The Gimp the command is Filters > Distorts > Polar Coords.)
As you can see we’re 90% of the way there!:
Easy cheesy, right? Now for some finishing touches…

STEP 3: ROTATE AND CLEAN UPThe rest is just a little digital darkroom work: Rotate the planet to your liking, adjust the contrast and colors, clean up the sky and the edges where the left and right border of the image came together. (The clone stamp and healing brush may be handy here.)

... and we're done! :)