questions & answers
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 01:12 AM
What is a Tiny Planet?
A Tiny Planet is a special way of viewing or ‘projecting’ a panoramic image. What you see in each image is the entire scence as I saw it, as I was standing in the middle of the planet. Forwards, backwards, left, right, and down. Almost everything I could see from each location is recorded in every image. The only thing you miss is a small part of what was directly overhead.
I don’t get it?
Here’s how it works… I stand at some location with my camera. I take a picture. I then turn a little bit and take another picture. I do this a few more times until I’ve turned all the way around back to my staring location. Then, using some special computer software, I combine these images into a normal panoramic image in which you can view the entire scene as a single image, which can then be projected into a Tiny Planet. So, like I said, a Tiny Planet is just a special way of viewing a panorama.
What software do you use?
I use a stitching program (which assembles the individual images into a single image) called hugin. Here is the web address:
http://hugin.sourceforge.net
It works well and it’s free. Actually, while there are many programs out there that will stitch your panorama, the last time I checked only a couple of them could do the special kind of projection which is used for Tiny Planets. Hugin is one of them.
What else can you tell me?
Well, not too much! The images are very high resolution, most start out at around 50 megapixels, and are cropped to approximately 30 megapixels. The sample images you can view on this site are less than 2 megapixels, so they contain only a small fraction of the detail which is in the full image. Typical cameras today are around 5-10 megapixels, and make pretty nice enlagements. This means each Tiny Planet, at 30 megapixels, will make a really great large sized print.
I have another quesiton! How do I get an answer?
Please send an e-mail and ask me! My e-mail address is: [email protected]