How To: Create A Lego Mosiac

August 3, 2006 on 9:01 am | In lego, mosiac, photoshop | 3 Comments

The following tutorial provides information on how to take any photo and turn it into a real life lego mosiac. All you need is photoshop, legos, and time!

	First, prep your shot as a square. For portraits, tight in is best. People will naturally view your mosaic from a distance or squinting to maximize contrast so details external to the person in the portrait will be lost (and a benefit-free pain in the ass to snap into the LEGO grid for you).
	In Photoshop, resize the image to 440 × 440 pixels and apply the Mosaic filter in Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic. Choose a cell size of 10. Then play with the brightness and contrast with an eye towards highlighting the most important details of the portrait.
	Change the photo to Indexed Color, select a Custom palette, and choose six shades of gray. The easiest way is to click on the grid and then when the color palette comes up choose Web colors only. Select white, black, and then a light, medium, and dark gray.
	In Preferences > Guides, Grids, & Slices set the Grid to a prominent color, gridline every 10 pixels, and subdivisions 1. Turn on a grid with View > Show > Grid.

In order to make the lego mosiac you’ll need one X-Large Gray Baseplate , one set of 2×4 Roof Tiles Steep Sloped Black, one set of Black Roof Tiles 25° (2×2, 2×4, Corner), and then as many 1×1 Studs in White, Light Grey, Medium Grey, Dark Grey, and Black as you need.

The end result?

Check out more great stuff from the original creator of this tutorial at Ascent Stage

3 Comments »

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1. Great idea – I can see myself in a new career of doing custom Lego portraits for kids!

   Might I make a couple of additions/suggestions, in order to slightly improve the output of your cute lil’baby?

   - Change the colour to greyscale BEFORE applying the mosaic filter or anything else.
   - Try the Levels function (apple/ctrl + L) instead of Brightness/Contrast – there is an ‘auto-levels’ function (apple/ctrl + shift + L) which is often useful.
   - Use the Posterize function (\Image\Adjustments\Posterize) instead, to downsample the number of colours.

   Can’t wait to see more versions as the years go by!

   Ewen.

   Comment by Nairn — August 3, 2006 #

2. [...] iBloggedThis How To: Create A Lego MosiacIn order to make the lego mosiac you ll need one X-Large Gray Baseplate , one set of 2 4 Roof Tiles Steep Sloped Black, one set of Black Roof Tiles 25 (2 2, 2 4, Corner), and then as many 1 1 [...]

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3. [...] iBloggedThis How To: Create A Lego MosiacIn order to make the lego mosiac you ll need one X-Large Gray Baseplate , one set of 2 4 Roof Tiles Steep Sloped Black, one set of Black Roof Tiles 25 (2 2, 2 4, Corner), and then as many 1 1 [...]

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