Different Mosaic Effect

We had a long day running up from New Orleans along a line of thunderstorms to Louisville and finally onto Nashville where I am right now. With not much time to post and a NFL pre-season game on the HDTV in the room, I needed some no-brainer play time.

So here it is. Below is one of the images I have previously posted and have been wanting to try a mosaic effect on an image. Yes I could simply apply a filter and I would have a Photoshop mosaic. That's not what I wanted thought.

From the image above, I completed the following process to make the mosaic below:

1. 28 selections copied to their own layer (Cmd-J).
2. Transform each of layers to give a slight rotation.
3. Apply a good size stroke (10 point worked in this case as I am working on a smaller jpeg).
4. Flatted the 28 layers to one layer. If you want to keep the original layers intact simply turn on the layers you want to flatten, go to the top of the stack and press Cmd-Option-Shift-E (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E on the PC). This will create a separate but flattened layer of the layers you had turned on.
5. I decided to apply a levels correction at this point as the shadows where a little deep for the mosaic effect.
6. Made a black background.
7. Used the background eraser tool to remove the large stroke in step 3.
8. Made a selection of the mosaic layer and expanded the selection by one pixel.
9. Deleting at this point will remove the feathering of the background eraser.
10. Reselected the mosaic and applied a smaller (2 pixel) gray stroke on a separate layer.

There you have it, ten steps to an interesting mosaic of any image you want. One thing I would recommend is to use an image that does not have a large area of similar color like the sky in this example. This if think would result in better mosaic.

Take care all... Doug