While wandering around
Flickr admiring all the wonderful talent out there, I discovered free software called
AndreaMosaic. This software converts your photos to mosaics using the photographs you provide. The only requirement of the licence is that you credit Andrea when you use the software.
To get a
good mosaic I think you need to spend a bit of time playing around with it and you need LOTS of photographs and MANY variations of colour. Here is my first one - you will notice that all the tiles are other birds. As a quick trial I only included 50 photographs for the tiles and limited the number of tiles.
To make it stand out I blended this with the original and a original copy with a sketch filter. This I liked:
Where I think the software has real potential is with irregular mosaics. Instead of using squares or rectangulars as a mosaic you can use any shapes. Andrea's documentation is excellent and if you read it carefully, it makes the process easy. I had a look at her section on irregular mosaics and my creative mind went crazy. The possibilities are endless!
This is the example that Andrea gives of the mask file showing that you can draw your own...
but I had other ideas...
I have loads of pictures of flowers so I included 2 directories of flowers that I had taken in gardens and flower shows. I then chose a daisy picture:
and converted it to the necessary maskfile:
In theory, the shapes should probably be closed areas but I was intrigued to see how the software would handle a file like this. Wow, I love the results!
Oh no, something else to distract me from getting my work done!
