Artensoft Photo Mosaic Wizard is a program that creates images from a digital ‘collage’ of hundreds of smaller images. This is, it has to be said, rather a specialised type of image processing; if you’ve never felt any urge to create mosaic images this software probably won’t be of any interest to you; but if you do need to create mosaics, this could be exactly what you are looking for.
In order to create a mosaic you need to use a minimum of 1,500 different images (5,000 or more being recommended). Unless you are an incredibly prolific photographer, you may not have sufficient images ready to hand. To get over this problem, Artensoft has two archives of images that can be downloaded. One archive contains an assortment of images, the other contains images relating to world travel. These are probably good enough to get you started but they won’t necessarily solve the problem of finding component images that relate to the subject of your composite ‘mosaic’ image. Personally, I would have liked the option to create mosaics from a much smaller number of components - with the component images being repeated as necessary, but this is not an option.
Artensoft Photo Mosaic Wizard has a simple tabbed interface. Here you can see some of the images that have been combined to create the mosaic which is previewed on the right of the screen.
Loading component images is quite slow. As each image is added it is indexed into a database. Loading thousands of images may take quite some time (depending on image size, number and speed of your PC, it is likely to take somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes).
The user interface of Photo Mosaic Wizard is pretty simple. Initially two tabbed pages are visible. In the first page you select the master image. In the second page you specify directories containing the component images. When you are ready you click a button to generate the mosaic. One thing the program does not permit is the dropping of files and directories from Windows Explorer. If you need to add a number of separate directories, you have to do so by loading each directory one by one.
This is a reduced view of my original photograph and its mosaic equivalent. The original image was at a resolution of 600x488 and the mosaic was generated as an image of 9735x7370 using 4,000 images for the mosaic.
This is a closer look at a small part of the image with the original on the left and the mosaic version on the right
Once all images have been selected, a third tabbed page, ‘Generating the Mosaic’, appears. Here you can set options to set the size of the generated image and apply rotations or mirroring to the component ‘cell’ images if you wish. Then you click a button to create the mosaic. This is a time consuming process especially if you decided to use a great many component images to generate the mosaic fragments.
Once the image is generated another tabbed page appears to let you ‘correct’ the mosaic. Here you can zoom in and out of the image and select individual cells to replace one component image with another. When you are happy with the results, you can save the mosaic image in Jpg, Bmp, Gif or Png formats at a user selectable resolution.
Overall, Photo Mosaic Wizard provides a fairly simple, cost-effective way of creating images by using numerous smaller images to make mosaics. The software does a pretty effective job of calculating colours from the small images to reproduce the effects of the colours in the original image. It does not provide much in the way of post processing, however, to allow you to smooth or sharpen images, for example, and you will need a more general-purpose program such as Photoshop or Fireworks to do that. It also requires that you have an exceptionally large number of digital images available. While you can download ready-to-use archives of images, these are unlikely to be relevant to the subjects of your own pictures. I would very much prefer the option of using a much smaller database of images.
More information on photo mosaic software
http://www.aolej.com/mosaic/compare.htm
http://www.ultimateslr.com/photo-mosaic-software.php
http://photo-mosaic.software.informer.com
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