

MOSAIC CREATOR ------------------------------------------- v 1.0.0

Win32/DOS binary distribution

Copyright (C) 2002-2003 Chris Street, all rights reserved, including
the right to republish this package on another web site. This program
is free for personal, non-commercial use only.

Download the latest version of this program from
http://www.codehappy.net/mosaic.htm

You should have received in this distribution:

 readme          This file
 mosaic.exe      The MOSAIC CREATOR executable
 cwsdpmi.exe     DPMI services (only needed for MS-DOS environments)


                    Instructions for Use


This program creates mosaic images, made from tiles created from
a set of images. To create a mosaic from your favorite picture,
you need to do two things:

        1. Create a tile set containing the images that you want
                to make up your mosaics

        2. Creating a mosaic from an image, using this tile set


  * How To Make A Tile Set

Keep all of the images that you want in the tile set in their own
directory (it's OK if they are in subdirectories of the main
directory, too.) The images should all be in JPG, BMP or TGA
format.

Long filenames are OK for the tile images, but tiles with whitespace
in their filename will be ignored.

Then call MOSAIC CREATOR with the command line

        mosaic set [image directory] [xres] [yres] [output set file]

where:

        [image directory] is the main directory where you're keeping the
        image files (all subdirectories of this directory will be
        recursively checked)

        [xres] is the horizontal resample resolution

        [yres] is the vertical resample resolution

        [output set file] is the name of the tile set you are creating.

Some xres/yres combinations which work well: 8 6 (for landscape photographs
and paintings, movie and TV stills), 6 8 (for portrait photographs and
paintings), 6 6 (for roughly square images, like CD or LP album covers),
9 4 (for long images, like images of tickets, paper currency or flags).

As an example, here is how I would create an image set named "picture.set",
containing mostly landscape images from the directory c:\pictures:

        mosaic set c:\pictures 8 6 picture.set

  * What Makes a Good Tile Set?

A good tile set will, first, have many different images in it.
A large mosaic may use from 1,000 to 4,000 tiles, and may contain
shades of all colors. To ensure that your final mosaic is faithful
to the original shape and color of the original picture, it is
suggested that the tiles in your tile set contain a diverse range
of colors and contrast levels, as well as having many different
pictures.

It helps if all of the images used in the tile set have similar
aspect ratios. You should resample the images to a resolution
similar to their aspect ratios.

For example, if most of the images in your tile set are slightly
longer than they are taller, a good resample resolution to use
would be 8 6. If they are mostly taller than longer, 6 8 may be
better. One of these two resolutions is often best for a tile
set containing mainly photographs, paintings, movie stills, etc.
Usually resample resolutions should be no larger than 6-by-8/
8-by-6 and no smaller than 3-by-3.

Tile sets especially for use in photo mosaic images are available
for download on various Web pages.

  * How to create a mosaic

You must have a tile set created first. Call MOSAIC CREATOR with the
command line:

    mosaic image [image name] [mosaic name] [tile set] [xres tiles] {diff}

where:

        [image name] is the name of the original image, which you want to
            create a mosaic from.

        [mosaic name] is the name of the output BMP mosaic file.

        [tile set] is the name of the tile set 

        [xres tiles] is the horizontal resolution for each tile used
                in the output image. This resolution may be higher
                than the resample resolution (and it in fact usually is.)
                The tiles as they appear in the final mosaic are created
                directly from the image file they were resampled from.

                The vertical resolution is obtained by using the same aspect
                ratio as in the tile set.

        {diff} is completely optional. If "diff" is present at the end
                of the command, tiles will not be duplicated until
                at least half of the other tiles have been used.

For example, if I want to create a mosaic picture called "happy.bmp",
from the image "happy.jpg", using the tile set "picture.set", and I
want each tile to be 64 pixels wide (so I can see them well), and I want
them to be different, I would say:

        mosaic happy.jpg happy.bmp picture.set 64 diff

And that's all there is to it!

