Creating Mosaics using Photoshop for Lego and Lego-like 1x1 tiles and studs.
* Photoshop template file with images and cosmetic layers ready to use: [Template]
* Zip file of the mosaics in 50x50 dot and square tile format [MosaicLake.zip]
The Mosaics:
These images were designed for 48x48 and 50x50 backboards that aren’t all that cheap in official lego but significantly cheaper in off brands.
I ended up buying the 50x50 backboards from eBay for around £9 each and the studs from AliExpress for between 50-80p per 100 tiles or studs.
To improve the look I bought 48x(1x4) tiles to frame the mosaics which reduces the free studs to 2304.
I’ve created a template Photoshop file to help me arrange and create mosaic templates from photographs. Feel free to download it and have a go yourself [
Click to Download Lake Mosaics.PSD]
The Template:
Here’s some of the things you’ll find im my Template
1. Pictures - Folder of source and processed images
2. Grids - see how the image would look with various coloured square grids
3. Dots - turn the square grids into dots
4. Board Sizes - narrows down the visible area for smaller plates
5. Borders - one or two units thick to represent a frame, also X & Y numbers to help when building and calculating the number of studs needed
GRIDS
50x50 plate has =2500 studs, [48x=2360] [32x=1024]
The Source Image:
First search for a suitable image to use. Depending on how many colours of stud you plan to use the more detailed an image you can use. I mostly went for black and white images that can be easily reduced to 4 colours of stud (White, Light Grey, Dark Grey and Black) while retaining the impression of the image.
Remember this will be low resolution, think sub-tabloid newspaper levels, so you need bold images.
Drop the image into a layer in Photoshop
Basic Colour Reduction:
First we are going to enhance and limit the colours quickly using LEVELS.
Hit CTRL+L to bring up the LEVELS command window and drag in the arrows at either end of the scale.
This will raise the depths of the whites and the blacks. As you can see the yellow is now brighter and the whites have become uniform (removing the lighter grey patches and blemishes)
Tidying Up:
Remove solid areas using the pencil tool. Pencil will remove colours in solid blocks without blending (adding unnecessary colours).
I swiped away the red lettering using the same colour yellow and even added a white border with the pencil.
If you left click and hold on the image. Then press and hold SHIFT before moving the mouse either horizontally or virtually it will make a straight line. This is handy for quickly creating borders. You can alter the thickness of the pencil with the square brackets ([ ]) keys.
Duplicating Layers:
I duplicate the layer during most stages of the process, out of habit. If i mess anything up I can easily go to a previous step and start over.
Click on the Layer in the Layer window > Click on the [+] icon (handily right next to the delete icon).
Basic Pixelation:
Now to do some basic pixelation to the image making it roughly into blocks. The template is designed for studs being roughly 15 pixels square.
Thankfully Photoshop comes with basic filters that will created a tiled pixelation for us:
Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic | Cell Size =15
We now have a much blockier version of the image and you get the impression of how the low resolution image will look.
A Bit More Tidying:
Using the wand tool you can select the broad colours to make them even more uniform.
Use the wand tool with a fairly high tolerance level. I used 44.
Now click on the the colour selector and use the eyedropper to pick the colour your have highlighted with the wand
Hold ALT or CTRL and press backspace to fill the selected area with the colour you chose with the eyedropper (CTRL or ALT swaps between the primary or secondary colours in the selector)
The Final Colour Reduction:
So far we’ve gotten rid of a lot of the random colours but we need to reduce it right down to limit the number of stud colours we can easily obtain.
Using colour indexing we can remove a lot more.
MODE > Indexed Color > Choose OK to Flatten Layers
* Note that flattening layers will remove all layers from the template.. but don’t worry we’ll get them back
Choose between UNIFORM and PERCEPTUAL reduction method to lower the colours while retaining the pixelation.
Make sure that DITHER is set to NONE and enter numbers from 11 to 111 in the colours box, note the preview shows the result before you commit by pressing OK.
Bring Back the Layers:
When we flattened the image we lost all the layers so now we need to get them back:
1. Hit CTRL+A to select everything on our flattened layer
2. CTRL+C to copy everything selected
3. Hit CTRL+Z twice to undo the flatten
4. Hit CTRL+P to paste the flattened image we created back in as a layer
Visualising the Project:
Now we have a useable image you can mess with the Layer options I created in the template.
I found it helpful for visualising for how the picture might look when rendered in square tiles or round dots and also the backboards colour.
* GRIDS layer folder for Square titles.
* DOTS layer folder for Circular studs.
Using Dots with different colours helps you decide on the colour of base plate to use as it’s background colour will show through a lot. So if your image is mostly white using a dark backboard will create distracting or distinctive lines while a white one will blend more.
NOTES:
Using off-brand base plates had a useful side effect.
Lego boards are made to a high quality but with limited colours and the clutch (how firm a stud grips the piece slotted onto it) is very effective. If you want to spray paint a board a different colour the off brands are slightly more forgiving and paint both helps the clutch and creates a better background colour when you have bands of colour. In this example a yellow strip down the middle column of the baseboard helps raise the overall quality of the background.
The more you buy in bulk the cheaper and of brands seem to offer a better range of colours, for example you can get a nice pale yellow tile that would enhance the otherwise solid yellow edge of ragged poster design. Baseboards also come in handy black, yellow and white colours.
Purchases
ALIExpress was great for bulk buying off brand pieces... much cheaper than Amazon or eBay:
Gorock OfficialFlagship Store
A toy A dream Moc Rebrickable Parts Store
Bricks Artwork Store
No idea how much these prices fluctuate or if other sellers have better prices, just the things I purchased in December 2021.
