Tiny planet photos

The tiny planet photos show us another point of view and invite us to dream while titillating our imagination. They often transport us to a somewhat unreal and magical universe.

Tiny planet images are often original artistic creations.

But what is a Tiny planet photo?

There are plenty of methods or techniques to transform an image into a little planet photo. The starting point is always a horizontal panoramic photo and turning it into a sphere (or spherical projection).

Now that we have talked about a panoramic photo, we also need to define what a horizontal panoramic image is. Simplistically let's say it's a photo whose long side is at least 1.5x longer than the height.The panorama can be full 360° or partial 180° or less. In general, the photographer specializing in the photo of mini planets will produce his panoramas by assembly.

In this case the camera is fixed on a tripod with a specific ball joint. The different images will be taken vertically so that the image size is larger.
The panoramic photo will then be stitched together using software.

When the panoramic photo is 360° and the image has been made without parallax effect, it becomes quite easy to transform it into a mini planet photo, for example by using a filter in Photoshop.

On the other hand, if the photo is not 360 degrees, it will have to be transformed so as not to have any shifts or sudden changes in color or light during its transformation into a mini-planet photo. And this is where the Photoshop application comes in very handy. Using a fusion layer it is necessary to reproduce a part of the left side of the image on the right side or vice versa. So in the end we will have a small part of the left and right image which will be identical.

How to take a perfect mini planet photo?

Different programs make it possible to create mini-planet images from panoramic photos.
For my part I work this part in Photoshop.
The steps to follow are as follows.

• Distort the photo to turn it into a square.
• Rotate the image 180°.
• Use the distortions / polar coordinates filter.
• Rotate again 180°.
• To create an inverted tiny planet effect (the sky is in the centre of the image and the ground around the sky), you can skip the second step and not rotate the photo 180°.

To soften the edges of the image, I try to outline the subject with the ellipse marquee tool. Once the area is fixed, invert the selection and then apply a strong Gaussian blur.

Then, so that my tiny planet image is perfect, with a professional rendering, I make the final corrections: colorimetry, contrast, light, etc... in the software for photographers: Lightroom.