Little planet photo → stereographic world

Press ? for the keyboard shortcuts.

The photo is wrapped around a sphere and projected from the zenith: its bottom edge collapses into the pole under your feet, the top smears into the sky. Every slider re-renders on the GPU, so drag them.

Crop + planet (C, press again or V to come back): the photo and the live planet side by side — drag inside the square to move it, drag an edge or a corner to resize, wheel to rotate (Shift for fine steps), and watch the planet re-project as you go. Rotating levels a tilted horizon before it is wrapped — which Roll cannot do, since the pole is always the crop's bottom edge. The amber rectangle on the planet is the output frame: drag it to crop the result (it re-renders at full resolution rather than cutting pixels out).

At a pole every direction meets, so one row of the photo is stretched around a point and arrives as noisy streaks. Smooth the poles blends that to the row's own average — the only value a pole actually has — so it reads as a soft disc in the picture's own colours. A true panorama has real ground there and wants it at 0, which is what the 360° button sets.

Below 360° the photo stops rather than repeating: its two ends never meet, so there is no seam at all, and the uncovered wedge is painted by Beyond the photo. Spin puts that wedge wherever it does least harm — which is how you decide what the planet is built around without re-cropping outside the tool.

The crop is a true equirectangular panorama — equal angles per pixel both ways — when its aspect equals Horizontal span ÷ Vertical span, which is 2.40 at the shipped 360 ÷ 150. That is the default. ` or 1…4 go to the planet alone and open that numbered section.

Wheel = zoom (fit…1:1) · Z fit/100% · Space or middle-drag = pan · O open · D download (Shift = PNG) · ⌘/Ctrl+Z undo, ⇧⌘Z/Ctrl+Y redo — every slider, reset, 360° wrap and pasted payload.

Source is the working render size — drop it for snappier dragging, it does not limit the export. Target is what a download is re-rendered at, which is sharper than resampling a smaller plate could ever be; it is capped at what the photo can actually support, so nothing is ever scaled up.

Right-click the title to copy every slider as JSON — paste it into a conversation to describe exactly what you are looking at. Shift+right-click pastes settings back in.