interlocking circle mosaic

[lambeaux]

Good evening all,

I've been trying to figure out how to make a mosaic of black and white interlocking circles from a photograph. The closest I've come is a halftone effect with circles but the circles are different sizes.



The picture above comes close to the effect I would like to achieve but the circles are in a square grid formation instead of interlocking like the picture on the left. Is there some way to lay out a mosaic pattern and force them to take on a particular color based on what is underneath them? Or is there a way to make a halftone effect with equal sized circles?

Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Redcaa]

I'm not sure if it's just me but I didn't quite understand the effect your going for. If it is just me then ignore this post, however if not care to rephrase yourself

 

[Remote-Medic]

I too am not quite sure what you mean but perhaps something like Rasterbation is what you mean?:
http://arje.net/rasterbator

Had to be careful with the spelling there lol

 

[lambeaux]

Thanks for the replies.

I would like to use two different colors of circles (light and dark) to make a real life mosaic. I'm trying to take a photograph and convert it into a usable pattern



I can make pretty successful patterns with a square grid like the one on the right above (by scaling down an image using nearest neighbor), but ideally I would make the mosaic with interlocking circles so there's less wasted space like the version on the left.

All of these are just test images at this point. Something like below but with better gradients is what I'm aiming for. I guess what I want to know is if there is a way to create this effect easily in photoshop. I've been able to manually create some test images, but they take a long time to make.

Thanks again!

 

[Remote-Medic]

Did you check out the Rasterbator buddy, I think it's as near as you're going to get:

 

[IamSam]

Hey lambeaux,

Is this kind of what your going for?



I followed this tutorial:

http://www.photography-art-cafe.com/cool-photo-effects.html

 

[Remote-Medic]

That's a nice look Sam, Like that

 

[IamSam]

Thanks RM,

I could have made the pixels much larger, I just used 10px cell size. I also desaturated the original photo and darkened it with levels. I liked the effect because it maintained the gradations.

 

[lambeaux]

Medic >> Thanks for the idea but rasterbator isn't quite the effect I'm going for.

lamSam >> That's pretty close.

I think I've changed my gameplan with the project. Originally I was only going to use two different colors of circles: black and white. But I'm going up to five now. I ended up converting pictures to a bitmap and then using a python script I wrote to draw circles over it.