Tutorial

Adding a planet to your photos

On the walk you have the ability to "live" see the planets rendered in AR with the aid of our mission cards, but we understand the limitations of photography and getting a well composed photo while fussing with the AR system. For this reason we've put together a photo editor to add planets to photos you've acquired conventionally. This makes it much easier to get a group photo with the card, and keep on moving through the mission.

There's the photo editor. Drop in a photo taken on anything — a DSLR, a friend's phone, a film scan — show it where your card was, and it places the planet at true scale, using exactly the same pipeline as our AR engine.

When you'd use it

• The good camera. Someone brought a proper camera, or you want the shot framed by a person who isn't also operating the AR. Shoot normally, composite later.
• The big planets. Jupiter and Saturn are large enough that getting them, the card and a person into one live AR frame is genuinely hard sometimes. On the editor you have all the time in the world.
• The AR wouldn't cooperate. Bad light, a borrowed phone, a dead battery, a browser that wouldn't give up the camera. Take an ordinary photo with the card in frame and add the planet on the train home.

Taking the photo

Shoot however you like. The one thing to remember: keep the card in frame — the Sun card, or the back of the postcard — reasonably large and in focus.

What makes a photo easy to work with:

• All four corners of the card visible. That's what the size is measured from. A card half out of frame or hidden behind a thumb can't be outlined.
• The card a decent size in the picture. A card that's forty pixels across can be outlined, but small placement errors turn into large size errors.
• Flat and steady. Propped on a bench, held against a wall, laid on a wall top. A curled or bent card skews the geometry.
• Somewhere with depth behind it. The planet lands where the card is, so leave space around it for something the size of Jupiter.

Shooting on the phone you'll edit on is convenient for one reason: the photo carries the location it was taken at, and the editor uses that to work out which walk and which planet you mean, so it asks you nothing. Photos from a separate camera usually don't, and you'll pick from two dropdowns instead.

Three steps in the editor

1 · Drop the photo in

Go to solarsystem.city/editor, then drag a photo onto the page or tap Choose a photo. JPEG, HEIC, PNG and WebP all work, straight off the camera — no need to convert anything.

2 · Outline your card

Tell it which piece is in the photo the wallet card or the postcard then tap the card's four corners in the picture.

3 · Adjust scale

Hit the button and the planet should appear, sized according to the card you outlined. You can adjust the angle of the planet by dragging on the screen as well as where the sun is coming from with the slider on the bottom.