Jacquelin Vanderwood

August 15, 2001

Centarsia is a rather unusual program. Have you seen those pictures that are made up of a bunch of little pictures? Well that is what Centarsia does, it takes a standard picture of your choice and remakes it with a variety of smaller pictures producing a variety of outputs depending on how you set it up to work. The program allows you to stipulate any size of image you want, the size of tiles to use, how often you want an images(s) processed, whether it should be grayscale or color, do you want it to generate an output for a web page, whether you want to crop the image, etc. Below I've tried to explain generally what the program is capable of and I've inserted some examples for your viewing.

Here you would open up a master image.

Under Actions you can choose to crop the image or resize it, open the Queue Manager, run the Mosaic, stop the process, go into Advanced Options or Advanced Features, and access Proxy Setup for Ad Bar.

I've opened up a black and white photo of Mark Twain to use for this review.

Here is the Queue Manager where you setup a series of pictures that you would like to use for your project by selecting your own files. You can also delete and convert selected files as well or add to an already existing set of images.

In Advanced Options, you'll find General, Queue Setup, Channel Dominance, and HSB Settings. Under General, you can select Image then Queue which will cause the program to cover your whole image with smaller images. On the other hand, selecting Queue then Image will generate a set amount of images onto your original but it will not necessarily cover the original image. At this point you can specify the Auto crop option too.

The Queue Setup is fairly self-explanatory. I must mention that if you want to generate a mosaic of grayscale images, this is the place to specify it.

In Channel Dominance, you can play around with the different channels to significantly change the color look of your image.

In HSB Settings, if you check Use HSB Color Model, what this represents is how you perceive color. HSB is more close to how humans view color than is RGB.

If you want to resize your image, you can do it here and maintain it's aspect ratio as well. You can check whether to resample from queue data, from original images, or load a mosaic and resample the original images.

Centarsia allows you to create a numbered grid as well.

If your main thrust is to output the image as a web page, use the Create Web Page feature where you can set the tile width and height and select the quality for output.

Here I've executed a grayscale image using very small tiles.

In the Queue Manager I've selected a new tile size which I specified and saved for future use. You can reuse the same tiles or select new tiles for each queue size.

Here is a grayscale mosaic that used 63 x 63.

You can tell the program how often to repeat tiles as well.

Here is an example using space as the model.

And again, here is a close up of a very large image with the 63 x 63 tiles used.

It's an interesting little program that can produce some very unusual results. It's worth it to get the program because it can do projects that would otherwise take an inordinate amount of time to produce. It is a postcard ware and shareware program. If you decide to use the program permanently, you would then send along to Daniel Lewis, the creator, $25. 

http://www.alhena-design.com/centarsia

Copyright 2001, Jacquelin Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved