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Step 2Photoshop Magic (Optional)
Photoshop is a magical tool, but it is not the only tool out there, so if you're more comfortable with some other photo editing software, please use that instead. Or if you would rather, skip this step completely and move onto step 3, that software is free and will do this step for you, I chose to use Photoshop though as I wanted more control over what it was doing. Or as another option, go ahead and grab some graph paper and sketch it out!
What we're doing isn't rocket science, we're using the tool to remove details from the image we don't want, as well as resizing the image using the various filter options Photoshop has to get us to an image that's the same size in pixels as we want with our Lego Mosaic.
I also used photoshop to "posterize" or convert the colors in the image to the colors of the lego bricks themselves.
*The first image below is the original image.
*The second image is after I removed the deathstar using normal photoshop painting skills. At this point I also made the image "greyscale." I knew I wanted to use the different shades of grey lego has so this was the first step towards making my image "lego color friendly."
*The third image is my final image that I used for the mosaic. During this stage, I resized the image down to 96x64 which is equal to 6 lego 32x32 green baseplates in a 3x2 configuration. I wanted my mosiac to be a "decent" size without being too unwieldy or expensive. Note that the image is crazy small, if you would like to see it better, save the image, and view it in a program that you can zoom into :)
During this step, I also didn't like how the face wasn't symetrical, the orginal image took the liberty of having the light source slightly off center. This looked fine when I was using 256 levels of grey, but as soon as I knocked it down to the 4 i ultimately went with, it didn't look good. After some fiddling, I mearly selected the left half of the image, copied it, then pasted and flipped horazontal to get a symetrical image. This looked much better in my eyes.
As for reducing it down to the 4 lego colors, the process went like this.
Under Edit->Mode you'll find an "Index Color..." option. If you select that, you can force the image to only use a certain pallet of colors. There's various options in there for different styles and what not, all we're interested in though is to use the "Custom Palette." When you select that, you're given a Color Table you can edit. My original image used 201 shades of gray, and only 2 of those were the same colors as what Lego uses for their grays!
You can find a list of all the colors and the various names the go by at
http://www.peeron.com/inv/colors
I decided that based on the availablity of peices, I was going to use, White, Black, Dark Bluish Gray and Light Bluish Gray as my palette, as such I created a Color table with only those four colors. (if you're interested in using those four colors, I've attached my color table to this step.)
Choose whether or not you'd like to dither your image and when you're satisfied, click OK :)
At this point, you have your complete Mosaic, you can simply blow this image up so you can see the pixels and then commence placing bricks matching the colors of the image OR.....
What we're doing isn't rocket science, we're using the tool to remove details from the image we don't want, as well as resizing the image using the various filter options Photoshop has to get us to an image that's the same size in pixels as we want with our Lego Mosaic.
I also used photoshop to "posterize" or convert the colors in the image to the colors of the lego bricks themselves.
*The first image below is the original image.
*The second image is after I removed the deathstar using normal photoshop painting skills. At this point I also made the image "greyscale." I knew I wanted to use the different shades of grey lego has so this was the first step towards making my image "lego color friendly."
*The third image is my final image that I used for the mosaic. During this stage, I resized the image down to 96x64 which is equal to 6 lego 32x32 green baseplates in a 3x2 configuration. I wanted my mosiac to be a "decent" size without being too unwieldy or expensive. Note that the image is crazy small, if you would like to see it better, save the image, and view it in a program that you can zoom into :)
During this step, I also didn't like how the face wasn't symetrical, the orginal image took the liberty of having the light source slightly off center. This looked fine when I was using 256 levels of grey, but as soon as I knocked it down to the 4 i ultimately went with, it didn't look good. After some fiddling, I mearly selected the left half of the image, copied it, then pasted and flipped horazontal to get a symetrical image. This looked much better in my eyes.
As for reducing it down to the 4 lego colors, the process went like this.
Under Edit->Mode you'll find an "Index Color..." option. If you select that, you can force the image to only use a certain pallet of colors. There's various options in there for different styles and what not, all we're interested in though is to use the "Custom Palette." When you select that, you're given a Color Table you can edit. My original image used 201 shades of gray, and only 2 of those were the same colors as what Lego uses for their grays!
You can find a list of all the colors and the various names the go by at
http://www.peeron.com/inv/colors
I decided that based on the availablity of peices, I was going to use, White, Black, Dark Bluish Gray and Light Bluish Gray as my palette, as such I created a Color table with only those four colors. (if you're interested in using those four colors, I've attached my color table to this step.)
Choose whether or not you'd like to dither your image and when you're satisfied, click OK :)
At this point, you have your complete Mosaic, you can simply blow this image up so you can see the pixels and then commence placing bricks matching the colors of the image OR.....
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