First:  you can easily product simpleviewer slideshows directly form Photoshop.   grab the scripts from: Creating a SimpleViewer gallery with Photoshop

Second:  you can easily incorporate slideshow made from Photoshop, or Lightroom or Bridge into Wordpress.

I’m a big fan of simpleviewer but until today I had not got [...]]]> This post has two parts and I’m mixed then up.

First:  you can easily product simpleviewer slideshows directly form Photoshop.   grab the scripts from: Creating a SimpleViewer gallery with Photoshop

Second:  you can easily incorporate slideshow made from Photoshop, or Lightroom or Bridge into Wordpress.

I’m a big fan of simpleviewer but until today I had not got around to figuring out how to incorporate a simpleviewer slide show or one I had created in Bridge into Wordpress.  There are plenty of utilities that will generate slideshows for you from pics you upload but what if you’ve already created one from Lightroom or Bridge or Photoshop?

This site has a great tutorial on how to do this.  and it seems to work well as the slideshow in this post below is done using the tutorial instructions.

A huge shout out to RC for this and the links so you can grab the scripts and add simpleviewer(and more) slideshow functionality  to Photoshop CS2, CS3 and CS4!

Requires: PS CS2,3 or 4, or lightroom, or Bridge or probably anything that creates flash slideshows locally and the Shadowbox JS plugin for Wordpress.

Click for slideshow

Let’s start with this image I built in Photoshop.

Basic Grid - ratio [...]]]> Part #2 is designed to help you play around and better visualize what Flexify can do in the creation of stereographic projections from equirectangular panoramic images. This part is specific to changing the FOV (Field Of View) in the Flexify control panel

Let’s start with this image I built in Photoshop.

Basic Grid - ratio is 1:2 (180 x360)

This is the 180×360 panorama image used in the following examples.

Using the same Flexify setting we used in Part#1:

Flexify Setting for a Basic Tiny Planet

Turns the grid into this:

Flexify Result A.

Compare this and the original grid to this example from part#1

Bridge Pano Before and After Flexify

Note that the first two rows of the grid are not even in the grid image. In the bridge image there is very little black sky above the lights at the top of the image. Numbers are smaller at the bottom and bigger near the perimeter of the grid image. The lights and support columns are bigger at the edges and smaller closer to the center.

In order to see more of the sky or top of your image you need to change the FOV (Field Of View). A smaller FOV is like zooming into the image and a large FOV is zooming out to get a wider view. IF I want to see the top row of numbers on the grid I have to zoom out / increase the FOV. Changing the FOV setting from 102 degrees to 144 degrees:

Incresing the FOV (Field of View) / Zooming Out

Now shows the top row of numbers:

Just changing the FOV can dramatically alter the image.

Applying just the FOV change to the bridge image results in this:

Basic Tiny Planet in Flexify with large FOV

That’s a lot of black space for this image. If your base panorama had lots of detail in the first couple rows then you might want a large FOV. In this image a smaller FOV works better.

In the next part, I’ll show what happens when you play with the Lattitude control in Flexify.

[Part #1]

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 [...]]]> 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.