Creating very cool “little worlds” such as those seen on Flicker is very easy and makes for great photographs and talking points. In order to make your own Little Planets you’re going to need three things.
Once you have these three elements here’s how to make your own Little Planet. Your photographs should present a panoramic view. You can do this easily by taking a series of overlapping photographs as you turn in a full circle, with the last photo overlapping the first one. Now launch any photo stitching tool, you can find plenty by searching for keywords “photo stitching panorama”, or use The Panorama Factory mentioned earlier. Open all of your images in the tool and run the wizard. The software will now automatically crop and join each image, and also balance the colour and brightness etc. When it is complete you should have a nice long panoramic image. To turn this into your Little Planet is easy. Open this new image in Photoshop and resize it to a square. Depending on your computers specification you may have to reduce the width somewhat. As a starting point, try resizing your image to 1000×1000 pixels, and you can go larger later if required. Now you have a weird looking square, you have to turn it upside down, so rotate it by 180 degrees. The final step is to use the Filter > Distort > Polar Co-Ordinates option. Once it has finished you will have your own Little Planet!