sixbitslocum
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2004
I recently found a really neat way to display the pictures from all of our Disney trips on the Disney Experience board (http://www.disneyexperience.com/lvdlabs.html) They explain how to take your pictures and turn them into a photomosaic (you know, one of those pictures that is made up of a lot of other pictures). It uses a program called AndreaMosaic. I was amazed by the results. Here is a link to my first photomosaic.
http://www.blackthornesw.com/jslocum/WaltMickeyMosaicSmall.jpg
Every picture in the mosaic was taken on one of 5 Disney trips and 2 Disney cruises. It was created from a pool of about 1000 images. The original file is about 30 megs. The link shows a smaller version in a lower resolution, but you'll get the idea. I plan to send it to shutterfly.com and get a poster size printout of it.
Here are some tips for anyone else who wants to try it...
- Don't use your original digital pictures. Make copies of them and process them as described below.
- Use only landscape oriented pictures. If you use portrait oriented pictures, they will be turned sideways. Using a program like IrfanView you can crop portrait images into 4:3 ratio landscape pictures.
- Create additional pictures by cropping existing pictures. For instance, if you have a picture of your kids with Mickey, create a duplicate and crop the duplicate to include only Mickey's face. By cropping existing pictures, you can increase the library of images that the software has to use.
- When cropping, don't always center the subject. If you place the subject on the right or left, you can allow the software to flip the images horizontally which will double the number of possible images it can use.
- When placed together, each image will probably not need to be any larger than 200 pixels wide. After all your cropping is completed, use IrfanView to size all your pictures to 200 pixels. This will make the software process much faster.
- When cropping additional pictures from existing pictures you should crop some to highlight different colors. For instance, I had a picture of my daughter in an orange swimsuit on the sand at Castaway Cay. I cropped the sand out leaving mostly her orange suit, so the program now had a mostly brown image and a mostly orange image to use.
- Also, pay attention to differences between light and dark. The software will make use of sharp lines between light and dark. See the rim of the platform in my sample picture to see what I mean. When cropping, create various light/dark lines. i.e. straight across the middle, top or bottom, or from lower left to upper right, etc.
After spending some time processing my images, it now takes only a few minutes to create an new photomosaic of any other image. My wifes family (16 of us) went on a Disney Cruise 2 years ago. I'm going to create a photomosaic of the Mickey statue at Castaway Cay using only pictures from that trip and frame them for Christmas gifts this year. It's been really fun to play with, and I thought you all might be interested.
http://www.blackthornesw.com/jslocum/WaltMickeyMosaicSmall.jpg
Every picture in the mosaic was taken on one of 5 Disney trips and 2 Disney cruises. It was created from a pool of about 1000 images. The original file is about 30 megs. The link shows a smaller version in a lower resolution, but you'll get the idea. I plan to send it to shutterfly.com and get a poster size printout of it.
Here are some tips for anyone else who wants to try it...
- Don't use your original digital pictures. Make copies of them and process them as described below.
- Use only landscape oriented pictures. If you use portrait oriented pictures, they will be turned sideways. Using a program like IrfanView you can crop portrait images into 4:3 ratio landscape pictures.
- Create additional pictures by cropping existing pictures. For instance, if you have a picture of your kids with Mickey, create a duplicate and crop the duplicate to include only Mickey's face. By cropping existing pictures, you can increase the library of images that the software has to use.
- When cropping, don't always center the subject. If you place the subject on the right or left, you can allow the software to flip the images horizontally which will double the number of possible images it can use.
- When placed together, each image will probably not need to be any larger than 200 pixels wide. After all your cropping is completed, use IrfanView to size all your pictures to 200 pixels. This will make the software process much faster.
- When cropping additional pictures from existing pictures you should crop some to highlight different colors. For instance, I had a picture of my daughter in an orange swimsuit on the sand at Castaway Cay. I cropped the sand out leaving mostly her orange suit, so the program now had a mostly brown image and a mostly orange image to use.
- Also, pay attention to differences between light and dark. The software will make use of sharp lines between light and dark. See the rim of the platform in my sample picture to see what I mean. When cropping, create various light/dark lines. i.e. straight across the middle, top or bottom, or from lower left to upper right, etc.
After spending some time processing my images, it now takes only a few minutes to create an new photomosaic of any other image. My wifes family (16 of us) went on a Disney Cruise 2 years ago. I'm going to create a photomosaic of the Mickey statue at Castaway Cay using only pictures from that trip and frame them for Christmas gifts this year. It's been really fun to play with, and I thought you all might be interested.
Very inspiring - I want to make one! Does the program mentioned work with Mac?
