I still haven't managed to get out and shoot any new material so thought I'd post a follow-up to my previous entry, i.e. another mosaic constructed using MacOSaiX. This one is based on one of my favourite beachombing shots, there's nothing on: a shot of an old television that John Washington and I photographed back in 2005.
If you're thinking of trying this process, using either MacOSaiX (for Mac) or AndreaMosaic (for PC), you will probably find that most of your attempts aren't great. For example, I've tried using at least 20 of my own images as the basis for a mosaic, and have only liked two of them, i.e. this one and my previous mosaic portrait. Part of the problem, in my case at least, is that I just don't have enough images to construct a convincing mosaic, at least not without using the same images more than once. As I've been trying to avoid this – by using each of the 1600+ images I've posted on chromasia just once in each mosaic – most of my attempts have ended up looking far too random.
By the same token, I've found that black and white mosaics work best, as each tile just need to be matched to the source image in terms of contrast and content, but not colour. Again, if you have access to a very large number of images, colour matching might work well, but with the images I was playing around with it simply didn't work.
What did work though, at least I think so, is the technique I used for this image, i.e. I superimposed the original image over the top of the mosaic, changed the blend mode to colour, then lowered the opacity to around 75%. The net result is that the contrast and content is determined by the individual tiles while the base image sets the overall colour.
As with my previous entry, I've posted a much larger mosaic here:
Oh, and in case you're wondering about why this one was cropped to 16x9: I would have preferred to have retained the 3x2 ratio of the original, but the bottom section of the image was rendered last, using images that were far too bright for this area of the image. Again, had I had more images to work with, a 3x2 mosaic would probably have worked well, but just didn't work out in this case.
 "Pin It")