Making a mosaic from a single picture

[crackthatoff]

Hi there how would I split a picture into 9 a4's so i could hang them on the wall in a mosaic sort of fashion.. I understand the picture will have to be a good one to blow it up that big, Just seen this on e-bay for 14 squid and it looks amasing in b&w........ many thanks guys

[Zad]

Do you have any graphics software other than Windows Paint? If not, then the straight forward way is to mark an area (dotted rectangle thing in the tool bar) click Copy, create a New drawing, then paste and save the new drawing to disk and print it. Do that for 9 (or however many) parts of the mosaic.

Depending what your graphics software is, you may be able to use it to span the image across 'n' sheets.

[crackthatoff]

Zad said:

Do you have any graphics software other than Windows Paint?

If it makes it easier i could borrow some software from the inter web???
have psp but its well hard to navigate round it !

[Zad]

PSP would probably do quite well. The problem (well, one of many) with MSPaint is that it can only have one document open at a time, with PSP you'd use the same tools but be able to have them all open together. I'm not sure if PSP has a print-over-several-sheets option, I don't have a copy here to check.

As before :
Open graphic to be edited.
Click the dotted rectangle selection tool.
Click and drag the area of interest.
Copy (either ctrl-C, right click-copy or edit menu-copy)
Open a new blank image (probably ctrl-N or use the menu)
Accept the size it offers you (it realises you have copied some graphics to the buffer and is offering you somewhere to put it)
Paste.
Go back to the original and copy/new/paste. Of course each area you copy/paste doesn't have to be the same size, so you can get arty!

I can't remember how well PSP handles printing low-res images. If you are unlucky it may come out all blocky. If so, then use the image resize menu and select bicubic interpolation (or whatver is highest quality) to make the image, say, 500% larger. It won't sharpen it up or generate detail that wasn't in the original but it should reduce the blockyness of the printed image. It may be a bit tricky printing them out, because the printer software may wish to enlarge or shrink the image to fill the paper. You will have to experiment a bit to find what is best.

[Kinky]

I'm 99% sure that Elements does this as a standard feature, which I run on the office machine, so I'll go check in a minute.

K

[MartinDB]

How about Rasterbator?.

Martin.

[twister]

Also check to see if your printer driver has a multi-sheet/poster option...