Look what I made!

Community Forums/Graphic Chat/Look what I made!

sswift(Posted 2004) [#1]
I made this for my sister's birthday. It's a photomosaic of her Welsh Corgi:



Click here for a full size image.

If you'd like to make a photomosaic like this, what you need to do is get this program.

Then take a bunch of images and make them all 160x120, which is roughly the res you'll need for a 600 dpi printed page. (The actual full size image I printed is twice the resolution of the one linked to above.)

Then you pick a source image that is the overall image you want the smaller images to form. This should be an image which looks good at thumbnail size. Large areas of different color, with nice shading will look best.

Then I reccomend you set the program so that it is allowed to modify the final images by up to 50%. Of course if you have a very large number of thumbnail images, you might not need to do that to get a good final image, but I find the lack of contrast in the thumbnails looks nicer overall than a very noisy image generated by unmodified thumbnails. I only had 22 different images to use, so the system couldn't match up the colors very well, hence the 50% settting to cheat and adjust the colors.

I think that having a four pixel black border around the thumbs also looks better than having no border at all which is the default. The black border around the entire image I added in photoshop myself.


elseano(Posted 2004) [#2]
Wow that's really cool. A very original birthday present idea, too :p


sswift(Posted 2004) [#3]
Well, she asked for a Corgi calendar for christmas, and that made me think that she might like a Corgi puzzle for christmas...

(I always try to think of something that my family members didn't ask for so that there'll be some surprises come christmas morning.)

...and that line of thinking, combined with seeing some photomosaic puzzles while at the puzzle store, and my dissapointment at being unable to find a Corgi puzzle, led me to think of making this.

It looks really nice printed out on glossy photo paper, and I'm gonna go out and buy a frame for it this morning, because we're clebrating her birthday today.


wizzlefish(Posted 2004) [#4]
I made a little program that said "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" for my sister - of course, she thought it was amazing :)


sswift(Posted 2004) [#5]
I think I did something like that years ago on my commodore.

I also used it once to create graphics for a mother's day slasher flick I made. :-)


big10p(Posted 2004) [#6]
That's cool. I guess it wouldn't be too hard to do a proggy in Blitz to produce mosaics like that. Hmmm.

BYW, sswift - is your sister's birthday on the 17th or 18th? Mine's on the 17th, ya' see. :)


sswift(Posted 2004) [#7]
"I guess it wouldn't be too hard to do a proggy in Blitz to produce mosaics like that."

No, not at all, but it might get you sued. Some guy invented "photomosaics", and they have a website, and the front page basically says something like photomosaic is a trademark, and the algorithms and "look and feel" of the photomosaic are protected by patents. It's so stupid, and it doesn't seem to actually have stopped anyone from producing programs like these. Perhaps they're only out to sue people with lots of money who make them, but it still would seem a risky venture.

And my sister's birthday is on the 20th, we're celebrating early because she has to work tuesday.

My birthday is on the 20th as well, but of March. She always got pissed off when I'd get nice gifts on my birthday because her birthday is so close to christmas she usually got less expensive gifts. Plus I like expensive things like computers and four wheelers. :-)


Physt(Posted 2004) [#8]
"Photomosaic® is a registered trademark of Runaway Technology. The Photomosaics software is patented (US Patent No. 6,137,498) and the Photomosaic "look and feel" are protected by the patent, copyright, and other intellectual property laws of the United States and other major countries. We protect these rights vigilantly."


sswift(Posted 2004) [#9]
Yep, that's what it says all right.

Btw, she loved the pic. She opened it up and everyone saw a picture frame but nobody could see what I'd done, and she's just looking at it going "awww cuteeee...", and then when they finally got to see what she was going ga ga over they all asked me to make one for them. :-)

I also told my sister that there were 23 photos used to make the picture and she tried to find them all and got stuck on the last one as I knew she would... Because the last one was the photo that they all formed together. :-)


jfk EO-11110(Posted 2004) [#10]
>> Some guy invented "photomosaics", and they have a website, and the front page basically says something like photomosaic is a trademark, and the algorithms and "look and feel" of the photomosaic are protected by patents.<<

Bah - this stinks... How about a little contest, "photomosaic in under 3 lines of code" or something...serioulsy.


Bot Builder(Posted 2004) [#11]
Lol. yeah, intellectual patents are getting out of hand. This, metaballs, tons of crap. I'm gonna patent arithmatic maybe. now i can get all computer, calculator, and abacus users to pay me...


big10p(Posted 2004) [#12]
Grrr. All this patent crap for algorithms is bull-crap. I mean, something like that 'photomosaic' thing, it's not like it's a super-complicated or especially hard thing to code. :|


wizzlefish(Posted 2004) [#13]
Then I shall patent eating. No one can eat unless they pay me. Mwa ha ha ha ha!


Baystep Productions(Posted 2004) [#14]
So it takes the same pictures, randomizes them and adjust the hue based on a color picked from a pixel on the picture that you want it to look like. eh, Whatever


sswift(Posted 2004) [#15]
PCD:
Actually it's a lot more complex than that.

It is true that it can adjust the hue to make the final image look better, but that's considered cheating, and doesn't look as cool as doing it the right way.

What it's really doing is it tries to find images that most closely match the actual pixels in the area in question.

In other words, if a picture is mostly green with a tan dog in the lower right corner, then it would be more likely to use that image on a section of the image that needs green in the top left of the image and tan in the lower right.

The problem is that they didn't just patent the specific algorithm they used, because one can work around an algorithm, they patented the look and feel as well, so any algorithm that produces an output that looks like that would be covered if in fact said patent is valid.


_PJ_(Posted 2004) [#16]

"look and feel" of the photomosaic are protected by patents


tsk tsk - bloody typical.

It's ridiculous, eh?

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Still, it's a really good idea youy have there, Sswift. very original, nice thought - hope she likesyour sis adores it!


danjo(Posted 2005) [#17]
i may patent air.. so every living object may pay me a royalty