I’ve lived in Tampa for nearly two years now, and I must confess that during that time I’ve never taken the initiative to go to a Tampa Bay Rays game. So, when I got the invite from a friend it was the only push I needed. It was a good game, and the Rays walloped the Angels 11-1.
I’m always envious of the sports photographers with their huge and expensive lenses. I can’t compete on that level, so instead I took a low res photo from my point-and-shoot and had some fun with it (see below).
To do this yourself with, for instance, a landscape of a city or a mountain range, all you have to do is the following:
How to Create Spheres in Photoshop:
- Start off with a wide panorama such as the above. If you can use one that is full 360 degrees that is even better.
- Under Image Size, uncheck Constrain Proportions, and match the Height with the Width.
- Rotate the image 180 degrees.
- Under Filter, choose Distort, Polar Coordinates, and in the resulting dialogue box choose the “Rectangular Polar Setting.”
- Use the Clone Stamp and/or Burn tool to clean up the line where the two sides join.
- In the case of this example, I also used the Marquee tool to select the area of the sphere I wanted, then did Select – Inverse to get rid of the exterior part of the image. Remember, you’ll need to Unlock the Layer to get a Transparent Layer.
- As you can see, I also added an additional Layer of baseball threads.
Comment on this post if you ever end up doing something fun with these simple Photoshop tricks.
Go Rays!
