Adventures in the Grid

I don’t think I’m obsessed by grids but I am using the 3 across grid format as an integral part of my Instagram post lately. Sometimes is just posting three similar items but I do has several 1by3 or 2by3 panel mosaics in my post recently. I wonder of they confuse by viewers, (I have had a bit of a drop in followers) or is it a bit of a hassle to find the grid display.

There are actually many tools and apps like Instagrids that can help prepare the grids but they all suffer from the instagram restricted api and fact that images have to be uploaded individually from a phone or mobile device.

There are many others doing great work with grids on their instagram profiles. The biggest issue being right now. there is no common hastag or icon to indicate a picture is part of a series so the casual browser needs to recognize the photo being display may be part of a grid series and click on their user icon to get to their profile. This is not a natural action for those thumb scrollers that I notice everywhere these days. Still those in the know with a bit of time to stop and appreciate the grids there is some wonderful creativity going on

I’ve settled for the hashtags

#1by3grid  #2by3grid  &/or   #triptych

When an image spread across several adjacent squares

See you on the grid some time soon.

Creating a PhotoImpression for the final patch

My final entry for the patch, was a photomosaic of all my weekly entries over the year. There are several photomosaic programs around, andreamosaic is a good one which is free to download. To the best of my knowledge there is not a photoshop add-in/filter that can make this type of collage. I have developed my own technique, I call the results photoimpressions, and I have used a variety of software to prepare the image but use a wonderful little utility called mosaic creator to construct the actual mosaic, it has a free trail, a lite and a pro version. The pro version is reasonably priced and gives you the ability to create you own patterns (tile tessellations) and ability to produce enormous mosaics, but would still I recommend you try it first.

The basis of my approach is I am trying to think of colour and composition as an artist might when confronted by a blank canvas. So the first step is like the composition sketch. Not all images are suited to creating a mosaic, you need a strong composition, with a good mix of positive and negative shapes. I often do this step with monochrome versions of the photos.


The next step is to prepare all the tile images, which I usually
put in a separate sub-directory (so they are easy to load) and reduce the resolution (about twice the resolution of the size on the final mosaic, this save time and disk space). I also like to control the colours in the palette of tiles. In this case last week’s theme was contrasting colours so I wanted to stick with strong primary colours. The entries through the year are a wide variety of colours, so I decided to run them through a variety of post processes. rather than use the saturation slider, which can make images look very lurid I have instead used the vibrancy sliders in lightroom to simply enhance and/or suppress colours. Alternatively I used some OnOne presets for lightroom to limit the image to a single primary colour.



The final step, like any mark making by any artist, is very important to conveying your style and intention. I particularly like mosaic creator because I can use a range of tile shapes (as long as the make a regular tessellation). Different shapes create different textures and can have a big impact on the final image appeal. To help strength the lorikeet I have also opted to have gaps between my shapes (simple puzzle pieces) and have the original image showing through the gaps. Also in this case because I only have a limited number of images I had to choose reuse duplicates of the images, and ensure that they are not use too close together, rather than have then used once and resulting in a  very course mosaic, Finally I wasn’t happy with my first few trials, so i ended up converting the lorikeet image to a posterized image with only a few version of the R G B colours (I used paint.net for this). This helped to keep the final colours “cleaner” Then I chose to sample both the toning and colour during the mosaic creation step.

You will need to zoom in to recognized the individual patch entries

The Gaia Birds Revisited :: My PhotoImpressions Method

It is a while since I created my first photo mosaics of parrots, for a group challenge on Redbubble. I have recently returned to the theme for inclusion within My Monash Exhibition at the Highway Gallery. However my PhotoImpression technique has developed a lot since the original Gaia Bird series back in 2005So I figure it is time again to explain some of the processes I use and why I am applying them. I actually adopted the term photoimpression to describe my process back in 2006, and I have noticed that the term is used a lot now for other photo related things, including as the name for a few competing phone apps which have nothing to do with my process. Further the wide spread use of “magic” filters and photoshop trickery means that a lot of people seem to believe I am just using a one click style filter or pre-set. Nothing could be further from the truth, so I’m taking this opportunity to explain my steps and why I do them. My focus of late has been on trying to look at the photographic processing as an artist might. In this series I have refined my workflow into four basic steps which map into four processes any artist might recognize and probably uses.

1. The Sketch, the first step is to look at the composition and tonal values of the image. Not all images make for good photomosaics, they need to have a strong compositional toning. I have found the easiest way to construct my sketch is to work in black and white. There are dozens of methods to create a black and white image of your photos, including a lot of presets and filters. In fact it is a bit of a holy grail to many traditional photographers, that perhaps yearn for film days. A lot of these conversions try to closely match the original film look and many of those popular films had different responses to different colours, for example red are often represented by darker tones and some blues or greens will appear lighter. This could misrepresent my tonal composition, so I have found I like to do my black and white conversion myself just by bringing saturation right done (moving the slider fully to the left). Most photo editor let you do this and it is very simple in picasa or lightroom. I might crop my image and possibly use the tonal sliders to better balance the highlights and shadows. At this stage I also like to generate a test mosaic, for which I still use mosaic creator. I pay particular attention to the shape of the tessellations I am using for the mosaic tiles. In the case of this series I liked a simple diagonal diamond tile which compliments the birds feathers. What has happened now is the photo has been largely deconstructed into a very pixelated image that still has the lorikeet just visible but you will probably only see it if you know it’s there and half close your eyes. 
2. The Kuler Palette, the next step is to mix my colours. Whereas in the past I have used a conventional colour wheel and the theory of harmoniously and complimentary colours or computer based palette pickers (such as now in many web design tools). Adobe has such a utility called Kuler and under their Creative Cloud Service, the new version now has the facility to select the colours directly from your photo in a variety of moods from colourful, deep, dark or muted. This chooses 5 colour in a suitable palette and indicates the area on the photo that was used. You can also move these point to get subtly or even radically different colour schemes. You can save and edit these schemes in the more familiar colour wheel format. There are a few images on lorikeets in my series so I created a set of complimentary colour palettes, some harmonious some complimentary around the Lorikeets and their forest background  I thus choose my palette from a number of related images not just the photo I had selected to process. This hopefully reflects the way an artist might take in the atmosphere and ambience of a place, when painting “en plein air”. Not just "copying" a single photo.
3. The Brushes, my next step relates to how I make my marks, the type of brush strokes I wish to use is a simple artistic analogy. My objective here is to use the limited colour palettes I have selected above and introduce a little variety in the texture of that “brush mark”. I know that it is frequently this strength and direction of these small textural details that make the work of some artist so distinctive, appealing and interesting. In essence it is these marks that let you see the artist’s hand. For this aspect I have been experimenting with using mathematical patterns based around fractals (geometric shapes first identified by Benoit Mendelbrot that have special dimensional aspects) With the aid of a computer these crumpled shapes can be simulated in theoretically infinite detail and echo many real world phenomena. For this series I have use a open source program called Apophysis since it not only allows me to select and control the shape of the fractal trace it also allow the selection of the colours of the rendering, for both the background and the gradient of colours mapping the multidimensional fractal into a two dimensional rendering. I took care to use a strong triangular seed shapes for the fractals and thus into the patterns generated so as to compliment the diamond lozenge shape of the tilling for the mosaic. For this series I generated these  tile patterns in considerable detail (over 3000 pixel wide). I also generated over 350 coloured and textured tiles to give the mosaicking process a decent range of brush strokes to selected but limited palette of colour.
4. Applying the Paint, this is the final step and again carried out in mosaic creator. This time the resolution of the image to be generated is increased and the library of new coloured fractal tiles is used to infill the photomosaic, but within the same tilling as the preliminary grey scale mosaic. I return the colour (Hue) and use not only the best match for tone but also a closest match for colour. Many colours in the original photo thus needed to be “shifted” slightly to match the selected palette of colours and the degree to which tone is matched is also refined making the matching within the mosaicking process by going from minutes to almost hours for this final render.

If you now look closely the individual diamonds in my tile tessellations are now replaced with the swatches of the fractal flames, which add new colour and texture back into the image. The magic is that your eye now sees the photoimpression (see first image above for the full image) as having nice detail and the colours as perhaps richer but the bird is again realistic, it just no longer has the detail or exact colours of the original photo. These have been refined as if by an artists eye.

PhotoProject :: self portraits into photoimpressions

 
Yesterday’s post was inspired when I found myself being a part time portrait model for the Victorian Artists Society. Normally I’m one of the students. I figured if I mounted my camera on a tripod and used the remote control, I would be able to take some photos as I posed. I also figured if I put the images on my computer it could also be running up some self portraits using Mosaic Creator, all while I posed. An automated self portrait? That was the theory! Well the remote didn’t behave so I did have to get some assistance, thanks Chris. Technology …c’est la vie! I had analyzed the colour palette and rough composition in a set of sketches before hand and thought that fractal flames would make great tiles for a photoimpression style of mosaic, and I had pre-prepared a small set of tiles to be my mosaic palette. Well the lighting was different enough as I sat and I had to “recalibrate” the colour scheme for the fractal flames after the event, to get a reasonable colour image but I did get some good tonal sketch-like results on the day. Was a lot of fun, even if it wasn’t truly an automated self portrait.

I’ve also posted the two photoimpressions above, along with my “words” version, from the post below, over in flickr to let you see the detail, Just click on the images to see them larger.

By the way I adopted the term photoimpression back in 2008 to describe my approach to creating photo mosaics, I note a growing number of, phone apps, software packages and websites now also use the term, and my techniques have nothing to do with any of these.

More on Photo Impressions

It has been while since I wrote about of my photo impression technique.  I have been experimenting with a range of the little tweaks available mosaic creator software, that I use.  Specifically I am looking for ways to bring the method more closely aligned to how a painter would approach the same picture.  I'm also trying to avoid the viewers first reaction being "Oh, that’s just been PhotoShopped”.
This is photo of Thai, a fellow student at the Victorian Artist Society. The photo is definitely not great in a normal portrait sense, her face is cut off, eyes not look at you etc. but I like the composition and her concentration on her painting task.  So here is a little walk through of some important steps I follow when I create a Photo Impression.

Importance of Colour

If I can get the colour balance and harmonies right, I know I will have moved much closer to seeing the image through an artist's eye, rather than a camera lens. An artist (and often me) may refer to a colour  wheel and look for harmonic and complementary colours. Reducing the palette of colours, to just these colours and many of which the image and creates interest for the viewer.  At this traditional approach is not the only way, there are now many on- line colour scheme pickers, for web sites, such as paint and just fun. Here are I have used fd  flickr toy’s palette generator.  You just select from your flickr or facebook photostream or upload a photo and it generates an harmonious colour scheme based on a dominant colours in the photo.  I can then select the library of sub images for my tiles in these colours. Picasa’a experimental search for … colour, has been very useful here, but this still a very manual process. For this photo impression I am using especially created sub tiles that are computer generated mathematical shapes, fractals, generated using the Apophysis programme.

Mark Making

The other area, where I can get the photo impressions to resemble an artist's work, using in the mark making.  Here it is the texture within the tiles and shape of the tiles themselves that can be harnessed to reflect the personal dabs and strokes of an artist. This is where a lot of artistic style and individuality lies. Those marks can make any work interesting and accessible, or just messy and confusing. I haven't found anything yet to best choose the tile textures and shapes, that is still a very personal decision. However there are some nice tools in mosaic creator to let your marks best fit the original image.  These are found under the cell filling tab, moving the cell recognition quality slider to the left (best quality) significantly slows the mosaic building process from minutes to possibly a hours, but it does force a more extensive search for an appropriate tile. One had matches the distribution  of terms in the source cell. I also find reducing local duplicity (a measure of how many times a tile is duplicated) help your eye flow over the image.  Making it less likely computer generated mosaic. The selection of tile/cell shape also has a big  affect on the surface texture of the resulting image.  I find I always need to experiment with a range of shapes before I am happy with the final photo impression.

Not a Fairy to be seen

 
Mosaic of fungai, up close and personal

My Photo Impression Methodology

I have been creating a type of Photo mosaic, I call them Photo Impression, for several years now yet I find it is the thing I end up re-explaining most. I’m not trying to keep the method a secret or mystify it but it is considerable more complex than “using photoshop with a background texture”. In fact I like the way collage, mosaic and Photomontage can extend a subject, there is a lot more that digital photography can offer than just photoshop trickery. Quiet a few notable artists like Dali, Chuck Close, Andy Warhol & David Hockney have been investigating parts of this process before me.

 

There are three main steps I undertake. They map nicely into painting steps and terms. The initial tonal map is like a sketch where I am investigating the tone, balance and composition. I prefer to work monochrome here. Next is the paint stage, where I analyse the colour in the original image looking at colour contrasts, compliments and harmonies. I like to restrict the number of colours, much like the impressionist painters, as it gives a more powerful results with potentially a stronger emotional connection for the viewer. At this stage I select existing photos or make computer generated patterns or even take new photo to build a small library or images that form my palette of tile. Next I get to choose the brushes to make my marks, only these are the patterns and shapes of the small sub-tiles which make up the final image.The shape, size and type of pattern repeated in the images develop the texture that allow me to bring a delicious additional depth into the works.

I do use computer software, mosaic creator, to build the final image and this can take several hours, frequently requiring over night runs. The preliminary stages are sometimes done on the computer sometimes manually and usually take weeks to months of contemplation. 

The fruit bowl that became a set of mosaics

I have been testing out my new camera body, a Pentax 20D, it has a remote controlled shutter release and an “expanded” dynamic range. I figure a strongly lit “still life” would let me test both. I also put on my long lens set it in macro and took a sequence for muti-image stitching later. The photos where beautiful but I ended up having some fun afterwards transforming the set into some wonderful mosaics.

My Photo Impressions (an update)

Whilst I have not been publishing them here, my photo impressions of birds in particular, have become my best selling works. This one, of a lone gull flying into the sunset, focusing on the theme “extinction is forever”.   It has been in preparation for some time for the Venus Artist Contemporary Showcase. I always end up doing lots of tweaking of colour palette and tiling textures. In the end I have opted not to include in the exhibition (it is the first photo impression I has included a written message on)  but have also posted it on RedBubble (you can purchase a poster or a large canvas version from them).
I treat the creation of  my photographic mosaics just like a classical painting. Whilst I do use modern software and digital photos I follow a more traditional method to develop the image. The photo itself is like the initial sketches one would do to develop composition and form. Next I look at the tones and colours of the image and select a limited palette of harmonious colours. Instead of mixing these colours from a tube I look through my collection of photos. Usually I just use photos related to the theme of the photos (shorebirds in the venus bay sunsets in this case) but lately i have been adding a few specially generate fractal flames in the specific colour scheme I am missing.  From this I assemble my new palette, a library of coloured images not just pigment. Finally I have been looking to M C Escher for the shapes and tessellations of the tiling. I have also recently moved to having some reproduced on canvas, and reproduced at a decent size to reveal the smaller photos used in the tiling when you look more closely.(see detail below)

Please note I have stopped using the term Photomosaic, which with this spelling has been registered as a trademarked by Robert Silver. I use the professional version of Andrej Olenik's Mosaic Creator, which is based on different patented techniques to those covered by the patents filed by Robert Silver through Runaway Technology Inc.

If you would like to be kept informed of norm's work, send an email to the address below and you will receive an occasional email newsletter of upcoming projects and exhibitions.

New Growth

Backlit new growth on a late spring afternoon can capture some beautiful textured lighting. This collage is an example of one of the new mosaic collage options in picasa 3 beta

The Engagment Party

The Engagment Party, originally uploaded by imageo.

I must begin with considerable acknowledgement for inspiration from the work of a fellow VIC/TAS thread memeber of the Australian Photographers!! group on flickr, thescatteredimage and beyond that to david hockney. There is definitely something beautiful in these recompiled collages, hockney describes this finding his "lergy", in the distored perspective that shift slightly in time as well as space. I guess they tell more of essence than a single static image.

Blue Eye Wallpaper

Blue Eye Wallpaper
Originally uploaded by imageo

If you like the mosaic below this is just a reminder you can download a screen wallpaper based on it and other wallpapers based on my photo from my flickr screen wallpaper set

mucking around with mosaics

I have been doing a lot of "playing" with photo mosaics, specifically the ones that make up another image. My software of choice has been andrea mosaic for a long long time. It is free to download, and gives you a lot of control over, as well as the tools to build the library of tile images you use. To be fair its user interface is old fashioned text forms, but perfectly servicable.

The past couple of weeks I have been trying out mosaic creator, it has a much snazzier user interface (it may not be any easier to use though) and has two important differences to andrea

1. it can generate an image using a range of tile shapes (eg triangle and hexagons)
2. It does not need to firstly compile libraries of tile images (you can give it individual images or directories of images)

This second feature got me thinking, I could use a standard image and get a photomosaic made from any given day's photos (providing I had taken enough photos). Here is how a few of the different day tilings worked out on my photo eye icon.