To elaborate further, I’ve seen one where they blended together all the photos of dead american soldiers in Iraq into an image of George W. Bush.
How do they do that?
I’m not sure, but do you have a link to that picture?
There has to be more to it than putting each picture on a layer in photoshop, lining them up and setting mix mode to overlay.
I think it’s usually done through a piece of software that takes a normal image (such as G.W. Bush) and discretizes it into smaller chunks.
It then has a large database of pictures from which it picks a picture that best represents each chunk color-wise
Then, presumably, a human looks through it and fixes choices that look a bit odd.
Voila, you a have a picture of Bush composed of many other smaller pictures.
If you’re speaking of a photo mosaic, there are several programs that can construct these. Here’s a comparison of some of the options:
There are two effects that you might be talking about. They are called, respectively, photomosaics, and jigsaw image mosaics. Doing a Google search on photomosaic bush brought up the image that I think you’re talking about.
Hm, apparently some company named “Runaway Productions” has trademarked the term “photomosaics” and clames to hold a patent on the algorithm to produce them.
I’ve never seen a photo mosaic that didn’t “cheat” to get the desired colors. I remember checking out the Truman Show movie poster up close, and they just tinted the small pics to match the color they needed for the big picture. Sometimes the exact same small still was used more than once, but tinted a different color each time so it would match. Doesn’t seem right to me (and I’d love to be corrected on this).
Pash