The Flexify plugin for Photoshop, and other programs, is a very interesting and remarkable tool. As with any tool it can be put to both good and bad use.
There are a lot of options for Flexify. For this post I’ll show some interesting things that you can do with Flexify and I’ll show some of the behavior of Flexify as it pertains to creating Tiny Planets and some other things that can be done with a panoramic image.
Many panoramic pics are 360×180 degree images. These images are frequently turned into spherical panoramas that are generally viewed as Flash or Quicktime images. You have probably seen these images as motion panoramas or VR tours of real estate. Some great examples of panorama photography and the resulting Flash output can be seen at Moss Creek Media.
While it is a lot of fun to play around with the Flexify tool, it’s more important to understand what the tool can do. Being able to visualize a final image before it is shot is very important to most photographers. It is not an easy task to visualize what Flexify can do to a scene. I hope this post helps us do that better.
Here is a panorama of the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge in Austin as an equirectangular output from a panorama program (such as AutoPano Pro or PTGui). The output of a 360×180 degree pano is an image with a ratio of 2-to-1. So your base pano is twice as wide as it is high.
Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge Panorama
It’s really not all that interesting to me. But I didn’t shoot this to be a straight VR pano. The image above is just an intermediate step. I shot this so I could use Flexify to transform it into something that I would find compelling.
In these examples, Flexify is set up for an equirectangular input and a stereographic output. There are many more setting available in Flexify, but for beginning Tiny Planets it’s best to limit your adventure to these input and output settings.
My basic first attempt is to create a Tiny Planet. This is a remapping of the coordinates of the image which essentailly takes the bottom (center of the ground) and makes it the center of the image. It takes the horizon and maps that as a circle surrounding the center. To do this in Flexify you set the it up as such:
Flexify Settings for a Basic Tiny Planet Image
Varying the Spin and FOV (Field Of View) gets to this:
Basic Tiny Planet in Flexify
I find this to be a much more compelling picture. This is the output from Flexify and it still needs a tight crop, IMHO.
Understanding that your highest elements in the horizon are going to be seen in the exterior edges of the circle created from the remapping is important. For me, it’s important to know that a picture viewed as a boring panorama might make a very interesting image when remapped in Flexify.
The bridge was shot with the expectation that I would remap it in Flexify and create the above image.
Knowing what I can do with a little bit of Flexify allowed me to sell a client on an image and photo shoot where a Tiny Planet effect is going to be used on the actual CD. Here is a work in progress image for the CD project:
Sample image for use on a music CD
On the next post I’ll provide some examples and a file you can use that may help you visualize what Flexify can do in the creation of stereographic projections from equirectangular panoramic images.
