Finally, a True Photomosaic

Photomosaic of Aya Hirano which is made up of 2000 pictures (1980 x 3300 pixels).

In my previous entry, I did a portrait of voice actress (also known as seiyuu in Japan), Aya Hirano by using 336, err... 337 pictures of her. Well, it was actually a technique called photomosaic but I didn't know the term at that time and thus, I just referred it as portrait. Hence, to me it was a portrait, a picture made up of smaller pictures.

Now, after some information gathering, I found more information regarding photomosaic and how to make them. Well, the proper and fastest way in this case, since I'm capable of producing one on Photoshop CS but it will consume way too much of my time. The fake photomosaic took me practically 2-3 hours to finish it (from resizing all the required pictures to fitting all of them into one canvas in the Photoshop).

However, this time I created a real photomosaic of (again) Aya Hirano by utilizing a total of 2000 small pictures of 50 x 66 pixels. But among these 2000 pictures, most of them are repetitions since I only have 300 over pictures of Aya in my arsenal. The end product is shown above, a photomosaic made up of 40 pictures (in a row) multiplies 50 pictures (in a column).

A comparison of the Photomosaic (left) of Aya and the original picture (right)

Here is some information on Photomosaic:

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The term Photomosaic is a portmanteau of photo and mosaic and had been trademarked by Runaway Technology, Inc. A photomosaic is a picture or usually photograph that has been divided into rectangular sections with equal size, where each of which is replaced with another photograph with altered color to appropriately fit in to the photomosaic. If viewed at certain (lower) magnifications, the individual pixels appear as the primary image, while increasing the magnification will reveal that the image is actually made up of hundreds or thousands of smaller images.

History

1993 Joseph Francis, working for R/Greenberg Associates in Manhattan, is believed to be the inventor of the modern day computer generated colour image versions. His 'Live from Bell Labs' poster created in 1993 used computer themed tile photographs to create a mosaic of a face. He went on to create a mosaic for Animation Magazine in 1993 which was repeated in Wired Magazine (November 1994 p. 106). Francis has said, on his "History of Photo Mosaics" webpage, that his interest in developing these techniques further was in part stimulated by the work of artist Chuck Close.

1994 Dave McKean creates an image for DC Comics, a mosaic of a face made from photos of faces. Although this is believed to be created manually using photoshop.

1994 Adam Finkelstein and Sandy Farrier, creates mosaic of John F. Kennedy from parts of Marilyn Monroe pictures. The result was displayed in the Xerox PARC Algorithmic Art Show in 1994.

1994 Benetton: AIDS - Faces mosaic. Over one thousand young peoples' portraits from all over the word computer-processed spell out the word AIDS.

1995 The Gioconda Sapiens, a face with ten thousand faces, was presented to the public in April

1995 (Spain, Domus museum). This was the first large photographic mosaic, using photographs of 10,062 people from 110 countries to make the Mona Lisa.

1995 Adam Finkelstein (published mosaic in Mossy Bits), creates mosaic of the oil painting American Gothic from images collected from the web in early 1995.

1995 Robert Silvers creates a Photomosaic, and goes on to trademark the term Photomosaic and patent creation of Photomosaics in 1997.

2000 Andrej Olejnik creates first pattern-based photographic mosaics rendered with Mosaic Creator software.

2003 Doubletake Images creates the world's largest photographic mosaic -- over 10,000 square feet (1,000 m²). The live event took place at Disneyland and was created by thousands of castmembers holding up photographs of themselves.

2004 Roy Feinson creates a series of 38 giant mosaic murals to celebrate Disneyland's 50th Anniversary in which 250,000 guest submitted photographs were used. ]The project included the first tri-level mosaic, comprising an image of Steamboat Willie made up by photographs of Disney castmembers, which themselves were mosaics made up of over 150,000 guest photographs.

2006 Picture Mosaics creates the first 3D scatter mosaic for Fox's hit show American Idol. The technique uses photos that are rotated in varying degrees and overlapping each other to mimic the effect of a collection of photos that are scattered across a surface.

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[Source: The Wikipedia]

Hmmm.....Maybe I should start making photomosaic of my other interest.