How Not to Make a Wee Planet in GIMP

Wee Mobile Alabama (Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception) by Pat David

I was fooling around again recently with some "Wee Planet" stereographic panoramas (previously mentioned here), and came across some tutorials on doing this with Photoshop/GIMP using a Polar Coordinate distortion filter.

While this will give you a similar result to what you might see from a true stereographic projection, it is not quite as aesthetically pleasing I feel. This is because the Polar Coordinate transform is not a true stereographic mapping, and will tend to squish objects in a very non-pleasing way.

I've assembled a few examples to demonstrate the effect and for comparison. The examples here are from Flickr user gadl (Alexandre Duret-Lutz) and are Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. Thank you Alexandre for making these available!

And really, what better examples to use than from "La Ville-Lumière", Paris!

On Little Planets

Wee Mobile Alabama (Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception), a photo by avhell on Flickr.

I've been a fan of shooting panoramic images for as long as I've had a digital camera. Usually out of a desire to expand the capabilities of early fixed focal length point and shoot cameras to get a wider view of the world. Taken to its logical extreme, we get images like these!

If this is your first time seeing one of these "Wee Planets", it may seem a bit strange to wrap your head around (pun intended). This is basically a full 360° by 360° panorama.