Transforming panorama pictures to a "circle"...(read on...)

[timo.heil]

Hello,

Xara might not be the right tool to do this, but I guess you guys use other tools as well and therefore might a possible solution:

I have a panorama picture (bitmap) of a landscape (i.e. the left edge is the end of the right edge...or the other way around, however you like it).

I would like to print this picture on a CD-R and therefore need to tranform/morph it to a circle-like shape.

Has anyone an idea how to do this?

Kind regards
-timo-

[timo.heil]

Hello,

Xara might not be the right tool to do this, but I guess you guys use other tools as well and therefore might a possible solution:

I have a panorama picture (bitmap) of a landscape (i.e. the left edge is the end of the right edge...or the other way around, however you like it).

I would like to print this picture on a CD-R and therefore need to tranform/morph it to a circle-like shape.

Has anyone an idea how to do this?

Kind regards
-timo-

[Christine Farrelly]

Please see the details in this post from Ivan Louette.

warped bitmaps

Christine

[Sheff]

Photoshop's polar coordinates filter be better for this?

Sheffield Abella
www.sheff.com

[Su Lawrence]

If I am right in thinking that this is the sort of effect you are looking for, then you could have a go at the Bitmap Distortion Tutorial in the XaraXone.

It was when I was experimenting trying to create a rippled water reflection. But it can also be used to create other types of distortion such as the circle effect (see attachment below) by using a circle outline to attach to the blend instead of a wiggly line etc.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Su

[Egg Bramhill]

....but there's probably easier ways using different programs.
Egg

[Su Lawrence]

Smacks upside the head, of course Egg's right ... for a CD-Rom you would want it flat rather than the 3D version in my last attachment. Not thinking straight.

That's interesting Egg, very curious to know how you did that.

Out of interest, had a go at the same effect using the multi-step blend 'along a curve' method plus also using the 'rotate along a curve' function to see if that would work.

Well I think the best I can say is I managed it, but it was a fiddle get it to work. As soon as you hit the 'rotate along a curve button' to convert it from 3D to flat ... it messes the whole thing up and you end up having to convert to shapes and delete all the odd bits, then doing another multi-step blend around the circle (which was also a bit buggy in parts).

So not easy to do this way in XaraX but it was interesting as an experiment.

Regards

Su

[mckinney]

You could accomplish this with MuRa's free Polar Transform plug-in available at http://www.geocities.com/murakuma/mmplugins.html . It is a Photoshop-compatible plug-in and appears to work well with Xara X. Note that before loading the image into Xara X you may want to use a bitmap editing program to make the shape of your "canvas" a square with the panorama stretching across the middle of it.

Another plug-in option is Flaming Pear's Flexify at http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify.html . I haven't tried it, but it looks good.

Finally, there is a nice tutorial by Jeremy Birn on how to produce a polar panorama using Photoshop at http://www.3drender.com/light/PolarPan/ . Btw, the Photoshop polar transform filter is also available in Photoshop Elements.

- Pete