Topic awaiting preservation: A photomosaic!

I have a roomate who has collected images of "hot chicks" for his random image screensaver. I nabbed them from him and added a whole bunch for the prurpose of making a photomosaic. Took a lot of work but I'm finally (almost) done. I just wanted to post here and get any critiques or comments from you guys before I goto kinkos and make a poster.

I did cheat a little. The montage was made of a grayscale image and then I overlayed the original to get the correct coloring. I also overlayed the eyes and lips to add detail to them. Is the cheating overly noticable? Should I cheat more or less?





p.s. Everything done in the Gimp!



(Edited by Schitzoboy on 04-01-2005 05:50)

That's a hell of a lot of chicks!! You've repeated images right... 'cos if you haven't then damn that's a collection!!

Cheat less.....more or less.

http://www.arcsoft.com/en/products/photomontage/
http://www.kirchgessner.net/photo-mosaic.html

(Edited by kromaZ on 04-01-2005 14:08)

Pixelate your cheating.

Ok, first off. I'm scrapping that image and starting over. A friend of mine saw it and said cool but who is it and I didn't have an awnser. He made a good point in that I'll probably get asked that a lor and I should have an awnser. The current image I picked just because it produced the best results of all I had tried before it. The close up on the face has broad ranges of similar colors but thin lines in stark contrast for the eyes and such. I tried a few shots of a whole girl but the face usually ends up being made up of 5 or 6 images and the results are crummy. I've found a similar close up of Kate Moss though which I think is also a better image in the first place. Plus if she is still recognizable in the mosaic to those that know what she looks like, then I've really accomplished something extra =)

Seems like the general consensus is cheat less. I was afraid of that. I'll do so this next time around. I did try to not make it so obvious but it really is. One thing I want to re-iterate is that the tile images wen't chosen based on their color, but rather on their total (greyscale) value. This produced much better results than by color because I would need tons more images for the color method to work. This does however make cheating mandatory.

templar: Yes it is a big collection =) My roomate started with about 500 images almost all of which needed to be edited and or cropped to be a 4:3. I picked 4:3 since I had to get a lot more images and desktop wallpapers of females are plentiful. Veteran asylumites will probably notice a lot of Max's images in there =) I am repeating images, the algorithm is smart enough to horizontally flip images too if they will produce better results so I effectively have double the amount of images. The program I'm using has a DON'T use duplicate images checkbox. but It doesn't seem to work for me Probably for the best because if it worked I'd use it and come to the conclusion I need a bagillion more images. I'm sick of 'em as it is. I have just under 1300 and that is after I ran the collection through a program a number of times to weed out duplicates. I doubt I got 'em all though. If anyone is interested in the collection for their own purposes contact me and I'll give 'em to ya.

kromaZ: I've played with some windwos photomosaic software but I havn't found any that accells over the others. I bet the pay for software does, but I'm broke and gonna have to spend a lot to get this sucker printed. The gimp plugin you linked to however IS what I'm using. Its not bad, but not great and my setup is a bit buggy. Its handy having it intergrated into the gimp though because most features it lacks I can duplicate with some of the gimps tools (like overlaying the orignal for instance).

Hugh: By pixelate do you mean alter the image i've overlayed on top with the color blending mode so that its "pixels" are the same size and match up with the images them selves. Not a bad Idea at all, I could probably do so and get away with a higher opacity too. I'll try that although it may be hard to get them to line up exactly. I've tried to setup the gimps grid (that i can snap to) to match up with the images. I don't think all the images are the same size though. Each one seems a pixel different than the last. We shall see if i can work around this in the next go.

Thanks for allt he comments so far, keep 'em coming and stay tuned.

^ Yup thats what I meant, you'll need to use uniform sized tiles though. Using resize set to "Nearest Neighbour" might be easier to customize than pixelate btw.

sweet - well done

This project has been set aside a bit while I work on my website. Since I've got the final picture picked out for sure now, I've decided to collect some more mosaic tiles that better match some of the final image's colors. Hopefully that'll make the actual photomosaic algorithm work better and then I can cheat less with the colors.

A request; I've added about 140 images to the source tiles, most of which I picked based on the similarity to the colors I need in the final image. Looking at the colors in that image, its obvious that I need more fleshtones. If anyone has some images that consist of mostly flesh tones please send 'em to me! Anything where the average color, or main background color is a flesh tone, or at least yellowish, orangish, pinkish, or
light brownish would be a big help. Actually they'd be a great help! I also need to erase any text that might blur to unrecognizable noise when the images are scaled down, and also cropped (or expand) everything to a 4:3 aspect ratio. I can do these steps myself pretty fast (in the gimp now too ), but if they're already done that a big plus that'll save my time, and put me eternally in debt to you.! I think if I get to 2000 overall source images, I can give a render another try with better results. I may need even more then that, but we shall see. Pics that work best are light fleshtoney (but not mostly white images. Extreme face close ups work good to, as well other other closeups like this one I found for a belly button ring I believed designed by Paris Hilton. Still I'll take any images or image resources anyone has. Chances are it'll get used maybe even in a new project. I just want to state how many white and black images, or even monochromes I've already have. Probably good for line art, but I definitely have an excess of them. The most offensive image I think included is this one These arn't porn images, just raunchy sub-playboy type imagery. Another type of image I need is pics like this: red (or pink), with a little white or flesh tones around the border. This will help define the lips.

While it might be shady to use professional photographed magazine shoots in a final work. (what do you all think about this???) I think fair use is acceptable here. I am offering the final collection of images to anyone who wants/needs 'em for similar reasons or just for fun. I'll provide a file, or bit-torrent if there is a interest. The pics make a great screensavers too. (note, there are a lot more colors than the one's I've focused on so the collection is usable for other images as well, however you may want to add more images that better fit your colors for the best effects, as I'm doing with fleshtones for now.) Am I doing anything wrong IP wise here? Could I post this on zazzle without the permission of every photographer involved?

Wow, I really went into the project with lil' hope for much. (I still see photomosaics as a bit trite as art, but fun to play with) but I had a good base image-base, and now I'm really trying to finish this sucker. I don't think I've seen a cooler photmosaic idea and I'm luck a small collection of tiles fell into my lap. Think it'll make a great poster when I'm done. This is a fun project that I suggest others get into. I'm learned a lot, and seriously increased my speed at doing simple updates to images. I've also had to freshen up on math a bit. Not to mention how much I learned with imagemagick ( a great batch image editor for linux). Any useful images sent to me will be highly highly appreciated. And I'm willing to share my collection as well. Even some site links would be helpful. (especially if they're not generic wallpaper sites with the same images over and over). (MAX, you still around? =) I loved your wallpapers, and have used a ton already!!

Thanks again, hope to have more to show soon. And please send sources if you can! =)



::edit:: too many expample links that tyoes were bound to happen ::edit::

(Edited by Schitzoboy on 04-24-2005 14:19)

(Edited by Schitzoboy on 04-24-2005 14:20)

(Edited by Schitzoboy on 04-24-2005 14:22)