This product has caused a lot of excitement amongst photographers and designers over the last few months, because when used properly, it can create some truly outstanding posters.

ArcSoft's 'PhotoMontage' takes one photograph and transforms it into a montage of upto 1600 'micro images'. The micro images are royalty-free photographs of all sorts of subjects that are placed in areas matching the overall colour and contrast of the main photograph. The result is one image, that when viewed from a distance, resembles the original, but when seen close up, reveals hundreds of tiny pictures.

Most Amateur Photographers will be limited to using the included database of 20'000 'micro-images', but professionals and stock photographers will be able to take a number of their own pictures from one particular subject (e.g. wild animals) and embed them into one favourite image. The result is one photograph that tells a thousand stories instead of a thousand words.

In essence, though, this program is just a bit of fun, but the result is certainly good enough to have on your wall, if you do it right.

The interface is relatively basic, but everything is there that needs to be, including image retrieval and image export (either by file or printing).
There are many options to choose from, such as:

• Number of micro images inside main picture (600, 800, 1000, 1200, 1400 or 1600)
• Micro Image Pattern (Aligned or Offset)
• Micro Image Repetition (Never, Limited or Unlimited)
• Grid and/or Border
• Source of Micro Images (use of included 20'000 images, or own source)

In the 'Get Photo' section, you can build up a small album of your own images to use as the main picture, or select one of the 22 included sample images, then it is simply a matter of hitting 'Build Montage'. It takes between one and six minutes to build your montage, which is dependent on the size of the original image (which does not have to be large at all, because the image will be broken down so much anyway) and the number of images you are embedding into it, and obviously, your computer's processing speed.
When building the montage, the program turns the main image into a negative, line by line, and then overlays the micro-images. The result is a photograph that has been turned into a montage of hundreds of different images.

I found that some images worked better than others- those which are relatively basic and contain stark areas of colour and contrast work very well as they are easily identifiable.

Original

PhotoMontage

The result is a David Hockney type collage. This particular image was made using 1600 micro images embedded into the picture above (which was only 40kb to start with). I saved it as a high quality JPEG which was 2.61mb. Although it does not look particularly stunning on screen, it looks very good when printed, and I imagine it would look very good on a poster.

Close up of area surrounding tree

 

Surprisingly, PhotoMontage transforms Black and White Images such as this one...

...into full blown colour montages...

Close up of head

Further close up showing a number of 'micro images' that make up the montage

 

PhotoMontage is certainly an original program, but personally I would only really use it if I had 20'000 of my own images to hand on the computer, which I could then embed in some of my favourite photographs- then I would have something that I could truly call 'my own' and be happy to print on an A1 poster to display in my wall, but, I only have around 5'000 photographs, quite a few that are unworthy of being displayed, and only about 1'000 of those are on computer file.

The only purpose I can envision for this product is for professionals to use it, pros who have access to all of their images on computer and wish to have something to display to potential clients on their office wall. I have seen a number of professional PhotoMontages, and they look absolutely stunning, usually because the main image is made up of hundreds of micro images on a very similar theme- but most photographers would be hard pushed to produce at least 10'000 images of varying contrast and colour.

If, however, you are happy with using other people's photographs, then this program is certainly worth considering as it adds a whole new dimension to computer aided photography.

 

Other features
Immediate 'Before' and 'After' View
Basic Image Enhancement - Brightness, Contrast and Aspect Ratio
Ability to save files as Bitmap, TIFF, PCX, GIF, JPEG and Flash Pix
Full Size Poster Service available online from ArcSoft
Category Specific Micro Image Library discs available separately
 

www.arcsoft.com