polar coordinates distort filter

DoctorIt

I found myself stuck with a really dreadful shot as my only photo for my daily photo journal the other day. As I usually do in this case, I tweaked the heck out of it. This time, I happened to stumble onto the polar coordinates filter that lets you distort the heck out of an image (go rectangular to polar and vice versa).



Now purely as a geek, this is super cool! After all, our image is just a matrix of numbers so I think I understand the conversion.

My curiousity asks: is there any real photographic use for this? I realize most of the distort filters are just that, cool mathematical distortions. Anyone else ever used this? Anyone else think its neat or am I up way too late? :lol3

cletus

Doc,

Nice use of the polar coordinates filter!

I've played around with the polar filter a bit, but I don't have a good practical use for it.

DoctorIt

cletus wrote:

Doc,

Nice use of the polar coordinates filter!

I've played around with the polar filter a bit, but I don't have a good practical use for it.

thanks mr photoshop guru

can't imagine there is much of a practical use for it. but I'm bettin' it could be used to make some pretty neat graphics. It essentially sweeps a path with portions of the image. You can see that in the nice loops in my photo.

Mitchell

I've played with polar coordinates to make "spheres" of some interesting images. I don't know if it is useful, but I like the way they look. Kinda like those colored glass balls you can buy at craft fairs.

Original


Spherized

DavidTO

Doc,

It's a great way to hatch your evil plans and control your very own planet

DoctorIt

DavidTO wrote:

Doc,

It's a great way to hatch your evil plans and control your very own planet

Uber cool!

colourbox

DoctorIt wrote:

My curiousity asks: is there any real photographic use for this?

I also got curious and did a google search.
This page explains the math. You can see where it might be used for translating between flat and global map projections.
This page points to this page, which is pretty interesting because it means that some 18th century artists would have killed for this filter (watch the movies).

DoctorIt

colourbox wrote:

I also got curious and did a google search.
This page explains the math. You can see where it might be used for translating between flat and global map projections.
This page points to this page, which is pretty interesting because it means that some 18th century artists would have killed for this filter (watch the movies).

ooooh, good stuff! thanks for the link!