Clouds

[Kerry Perkins]

What do you see?

I stumbled upon this workflow a while back while learning how to do mini-worlds. I just leave off the last part, which is the polar conversion step at the end. Here's how it goes:

I take a landscape image that has a prominent feature on either the left or right edge, like this base shot which has a set of hills rising up toward the right edge. I do a pretty extreme pano crop, then add canvas on the right so that I can flip the image and place the mirror image into the right half. Now I have one very wide pano image. I go to image>image size and make the image square. Since I'm working on a tiff file at this point and have resolution to spare, I want to add pixels and not take them away, so I make the vertical pixels equal to the horizontal pixels (stretching the image vertically instead of squashing it horizontally). Now there is a square image that has this strange warping effect, and you can crop it to whatever aspect you like or makes sense for the image.

This is a four-image HDR converted in HDR Efex Pro. Then I used Topaz Adjust and Detail and did some color adjustments in CS5.

[Steve Bein]

Kerry, A cool result well done, creative and inspiring. The sky looks like a giant insect ready to devour the reader. Good to meet you in person at the Adventurers Club .

[Indranil Sircar]

I remember this one, Kerry. I like the sky although would have preferred a bit more contrast. Nicely done.

[Mark Fuge]

Very interesting image and application, Kerry.

Like the effect on the clouds.

[Jay Sheinfield]

Very cool Kerry..............this is like the Wizard of OZ, only in grander scale. There is a puppy face at the crest of the mountain.................like the colors.

[Anita Bower]

This image is a little scary! Looks like it belongs in one of my son's computer games! Well done.

[Kerry Perkins]

Thanks everyone! Anita, that is a nice compliment. Indranil, I just did this one last night, so I think you are remembering the blue one from a couple of years ago - HERE Good memory!

Steve, a pleasure to meet you too and thanks so much for the invitation!

[Maureen Allen]

This is great. I took a look at the last one you linked to and that is wonderful as well.

You're planting ideas in my brain for my upcoming Yellowstone trip!

[Andrew McLachlan]

Kerry, this is really cool. The clouds are kinda spooky looking!