While perusing the Technique group on Flickr the other day I found a post about creating “Amazing Circles”. The name sounded so cheesy I couldn’t resist checking it out. And now it’s my latest addiction. I spent the better part of a weekend going through my old pictures looking for good candidates to try out this technique on and in the process learned a few things about how to make a good Amazing Circle.

I learned how to do it from a tutorial that one of my fellow Flickrers wrote up, but I made a few changes to the process to suit my needs. This is a description of how I make mine.

Selecting a candidate

I have found that some of the best candidates are actually pictures that I didn’t really find all that interesting in their original form. Look for pictures with strong repeating patterns such as lines or curves. Also photos with a “boring” center but otherwise with lots of details (such as a picture of flowers on a tree branch) work well. Images with a lot of “deep texture” (such as wood carvings or holes where you can see the background or other objects through them) are interesting options as well. And don’t be afraid to try unusual subjects: as long as they have some depth you might end up with something very unique.

Creating the Circle

I have created a Photoshop action for these steps, but if you don’t want to download and use it, here’s what to do.

1. Make a copy of your image to work with because the changes will be destructive.
2. Open your copied image in Photoshop and drag a square selection over the general area you want to make into your circle. It doesn’t have to be precise because you’ll edit it in the next step. To make sure the selection is square, choose “Fixed Aspect Ratio” in the Style box and enter 1 in both the Height and Width boxes on the toolbar.
3. Choose Select->Transform Selection.
4. Click the lock on the toolbar between the width and height so that you will be scaling only as a square.
   
   Also make sure when you size to only pull from the corners of the selection.
5. Find the darkest part of the center of your image.
   I usually look for a shadow (as close to black as possible) or at least a dark, interesting color. It only has to be a few pixels wide. Move the selection (drag or use arrow keys) so that the center marker is over your chosen spot. This spot will be the color in the “background” of your circle when it’s finished. A dark color helps frame the circle.
6. Drag the corners of the selection to scale it. This is a subjective matter but the larger area you capture the larger (and better for printing) your circle will end up being. Sometimes it’s better to crop closer however. The parts of the image that are closest to the edge of your selection will be what shows up in the middle of your circle when it is finished. Making sure that there’s a lot of interesting “stuff” on the edges helps make your circle more interesting and dynamic.
7. When you’re satisfied with your selection save it (press ENTER) to leave the transformation stage.
8. Choose Image->Crop.
9. Choose Filter->Distort->Polar Coordinates, choose Polar to Rectangular in the dialog and click OK.
10. Choose Image->Rotate Canvas->180^o
11. Choose Filter->Distort->Polar Coordinates, choose Rectangular to Polar in the dialog and click OK.

You’re done!

There are some things you can do “post production” to clean up the circle a bit. If you don’t like your background color, create a circular selection over it (remember the fixed aspect ratio 1:1), choose Select->Inverse and fill with a color you prefer.

And if your circle doesn’t quite “work” for you, there’s probably still some things you can do to it with mirroring and other effects. I might write up a tutorial soon on how to do those as well.

What do you think? Here is my gallery if you need some examples of what can be done! There’s an Amazing Circles Flickr group that you can post them in if you’re a Flickr user. Leave me a comment with a link if you make some! I’d love to see them.