Spherized Dahlia

[Diane Miller]

I've been running off at the mouth again, so thought I'd better toss something out. I've been terribly remiss with creativity lately, which needs to be addressed, so this is an older one I dredged up. Just the old standard orbital action.

[Nancy Bell]

Love this composition of a circle in a square, and then an explosion of color and shapes inside! Great to have definite center point, emphasizing the geometry of a circle and giving the eye somewhere to start, or come to rest. Fantastic!

[Paul Lagasi]

Nice color, this reminds me so much of the mini-worlds that were created in OOTB, very nice work Diane

[Jackie Schuknecht]

Perfect image for the treatment, would it be the old standard "polar coo-ordinates?

[Diane Miller]

Thanks, guys!

Sort of, Jackie, but a bizarre-sounding twist on it. Credit goes to Carol Leigh (http://visualeigh.blogspot.com/). Check out her blog for mind-boggling artistic creativity. (She's a cool lady, too!)

Flatten image, change to 8 bit
Crop or distort to square (if you want a circle): Image Size, uncheck Constrain Proportions to distort
Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates, Polar to Rectangular
Rotate 180
Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates, Rectangular to Polar
(trust me -- it works this miracle!)

You can make an action so you can try it quickly on a lot of images. You can also make one with the steps backwards to deconstruct an orbital image -- just for fun. Of course it will have lost lots of IQ because of all the distortion but you can see where something came from, which you can't otherwise.

[Jackie Schuknecht]

Thanks for the info Diane, I will try it!

[Cheryl Slechta]

Diane, a very cool OOTB image and thanks for the instructions - something new to play with I especially like the fact that the "center" of the flower is off-center in the composition. I like it a lot. Thanks for sharing.

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Diane, this is very cool and I like it a lot! I hadn't thought of adding the twist at the end of the steps of converting back to polar. Very cool. Would you mind if I added this to the OOTB workflow sticky? We haven't added anything new in a while.

[Diane Miller]

Sure, I'd be happy for you to do that. Credit Carol Leigh, not me! (I don't know if she invented it, but she's where I first heard about it, some years ago.)

[Kerry Perkins]

Thanks Diane!

[Nancy Bell]

Diane, this is so fun to play with! I didn't get anything as interesting as your image. But now I will look for flowers with many clustered petals. Thanks for the website and instructions!

[Kerry Perkins]

I added this thread, with credit to you Diane for the image and to Carol Leigh for the technique, to the workflow sticky. Thanks!

[gary ellwein]

Diane, this one immediately caught my eye. Thanks for the recipe. I look forward to trying it.

[Hazel Grant]

Thanks for the steps. Hard to "see" how to present a familiar image/flower in a new way. You did it here. Understand the creative lull...having it myself. Maybe it's summer.