How to make this orb image and get a smooth join.

Here's the original:

I used GIMP to make the orb the following way:

In GIMP the source image can be any shape and you'll get a circular result, (I think in other packages you'd need to scale the source to a rectangle first).

1) created a test orb using 'Filters>Distorts>Polar Coordinates' to see what happened.


2) the 'horizon' didn't match at the seam so I undid rotated slightly, redid and just repeated this until the 'horizon' was in alignment at the seam.


3) the source image has left right a left right shading which showed up at the seam.

The shading was corrected by creating a new layer, then using the 'blend' tool to shade it black to white left to right (or maybe vice versa, which ever was right), then used 'mode: lighten only' on the layer (or maybe 'darken only', which ever worked) and then adjusted the layer's transparency to get a clean seam.


4) the seam was still visible due to image content differences at the edges so then used the smudge tool to blend across the seam.


5) finally the image was rotated to get the pair of walkers at the bottom of the image. (If you want to find the seam it's approximately from the top left corner to the centre), cropped to a square and filled the frame with a black flood fill.

For the forest orb

the same processes were used, but as there was a lot of detail at the seam used the clone tool to hide it in step 4)

source image: