How to make a photo mosaic

Have you ever seen these photo mosaics for celebrities or movie posters and wonder how they did that?  Well, its time to create your own. Now that you have your photos scanned to a digital format, choose a photo you want to use as the main picture for your mosaic and lets have some fun.

Here is what you need to accomplish this:

• all your scanned photos from Scanapix along with any digital pictures you may have taken.

• a computer

• download this free pc program Andrea Mosaic

The Andrea Mosaic software is easy to use. It may take you a couple tries to perfect your final mosaic and become a mosaic expert, but the effort will all be worth it.

Here is a photo I took on a nice gloomy day  in London that we will use as the main mosaic photo.

Here is the ‘Let me just try it out as soon as possible’ step by step  tutorial.

1. Put all the pictures you want to use for the mosaic into a folder that is easily accessible.
2. Open up the Andrea Mosaic software
3. Choose the image you want to use for the mosaic where it says original images
4. Click on ‘Select Tiles’ at the bottom. This will open up another screen
5. Click ‘add folder’ to choose the folder with all the pictures in step 1.
6. Click on the button that says ‘save archive’ This will make a folder in your computer saving all the photos you are going to use.
7. Now you are back at the original screen. Click on the button ‘Create Mosaic’ at the bottom left of the page.

Results:

I used a folder with all of the pictures I had from a trip I took backpacking in Europe. There was a total of 613 images. This is what the mosaic looks like without messing with any of the options from the software.

You can tell that the more photos you have, the nicer the mosaics will turn out. But if you do not have that many images, you can still maintain a high quality mosaic by making adjustments to the tile variations.

If you need more detailed information about the software, Andrea Mosaic’s site has a very detailed tutorial.Visit the software website tutorials by clicking here.

Creating a custom photobook.

Creating a custom photobook is actually a lot easier than many people would think. I recommend this service called Blurb. I have used them in the past and the finished books have always been superb quality. To get started, you will want to visit www.blurb.com. They have a free download (currently Blurb BookSmart 1.9) that allows you to use their software to make your book. The software is really simple to work with and is surprisingly intuitive. You will surely find a theme you will like to work with, as well as a myriad of choices for photo and text page layouts.

With all the scanned photos you have, you will want to decide the art direction for the book. There should be some theme to the book so it isn’t a complete mess to look at. The beauty of the software they provide is that you can just plug in your scanned photos (use the print quality photos from the Scanapix DVD, not the web quality) and see what the final product will look like. You can add text, change the size of the images, or even use some basic design elements from the BookSmart software.

If you know how to use a photo editing software like Photoshop, your possibilities for the book are limitless. Of course this might take a lot more time, but its not everyday you get to publish your own masterpiece.

The last book I created was made to be a Christmas gift. I got my high quality photos and expanded them to be the entire page to make a very basic photo collection. Just 40 pages of stunning photos. I paid extra for the high quality paper option and to have the cover custom printed onto the book (rather than a sleeve) After showing all my friends and family, they were amazed how beautiful the book turned out.

You can look for coupons to get better deals on custom photo book printing services like blurb.com. If you do a basic Google search for a coupon/promo code, you should be able to find one.

Good Luck

John