Macenstein

The waiting game

The most impressive thing to me about Leopard’s photomosaic screensaver is how quickly it can create the mosaics. I have been using MacOSaiX for years (since the buggy beta days) and even in version 2 it can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple hours to complete a large mosaic with a pool of thousands of source images (and that’s on a quad-core Mac Pro with 5 GB of RAM). So be patient. When it’s done cooking, hit “Export” to save your mosaic. MacOSaiX can export GIANT versions of the finished product. Be careful when picking your size, as choosing something like 300 DPI at 100 x 100 inches will likely give you memory errors (even with my 5 GB of RAM). Working at 72 DPI and 90 inches max width works fine for making large prints.

The finished result

Ta-Da! Looks pretty darn good. But it could look a little better. Right now it looks sort of like what Leopard’s screensaver might give you (although much higher res). What I like to do is take my finished mosaic into Photoshop, and then paste the original image back on top of it (first, check the image size of the newly created mosaic in Photoshop, then resize your original photo to match the dimensions. Next, just copy that image and paste it into the mosaic image). Depending on the image, I then change the blend mode to either “overlay”, “color”, “lighten”, or “multiply”, and put the opacity down to 10-20%. Sometimes I even do multiple “enhancing” layers with different settings. This is cheating, I know, but it helps some details pop, and helps the image look even more like the original when viewed from a distance. In light areas of the photo the overlay can sometimes look too obvious, so I usually mask the opacity of those ares out. Finally, I sometimes either boost the color or desaturate it entirely, depending on the original.

The REALLY finished result

Above: the result after desaturating in Photoshop to match the original B&W shot, as well as combining a 50% “Lighten” layer on top.

Not bad at all, and I’m sure my sister-in-law will love it, or at least pretend to. Considering I was working with “only” 1400 or so images provided to me by my brother, I think it came out pretty good. Of course, since once you set these up, they really make themselves, I am sure I will crank out a few more before Christmas, and let my sister-in-law choose which one to dislay. All that’s left now is to buy a frame and upload the image to my local drug store (or burn it to a CD) and have them print them out (usually only an hour’s wait).

I find these look quite good at 11 x 17, but if you are giving someone a gift, you can’t in good conscience give them something that large knowing they’ll be “forced” by guilt to display. Even in a bathroom, that’s just too large. So I recommend an 8 x 10. That is still large enough that when people get close to it, they can see all the small images that made up the original, yet small enough that it can be displayed tastefully.

So there you have it, a gift sure to pull at the heart strings of any mom, created for $20 or less. Great for Christmas, Mother’s Day, Birthdays… whatever. It has also been my experience that other mom’s go crazy for them when visiting, so be careful, or you’ll end up having to make them for your kid’s whole playgroup.