[Leica] Spherical projections

["Aram Langhans" <langhans@yakima-wa.com>]

A round-about question related to photography.  I have a friend who has a
laser engraver and he wants to engrave photos on to things like baseballs
for promotions, etc.  Of course, if he just takes a straight bitmap and
engraves it on the spherical surface it is quite distorted.  He was asking
me how to correct for that and I was thinking you have to apply something
like a pincushion distortion to the original bitmap and then engrave it.  I
think the problem is the reverse of what map makers go through to get a
spherical surface on to a plane surface.  I remember working with some of
those projections 30 years ago in a college geography class.  I told him I
would tap into the wealth of knowledge that is the LUG and see if someone
out there knows what kind of projection he would need and what software
might be able to accomplish this.

One more thing.  He does have an attachment that can rotate the object in
the engraver in one dimension, so he can engrave cylinders w/o any
distortion.  So, he would just have to apply the distortion correcting
projection to just one dimension.

I hope I explained this sufficently.

Thanks

Aram


This message is made of 100% recycled electrons.  No new atoms were
destroyed in making it.

Aram Langhans
Science Teacher, Naches High School
101 W. 5th. St / P. O. Box 159
Naches, WA 98937

"Science Rules"

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