This tutorial will go over how to adjust your digital mosaic settings. It will include instructions on how to color tune your mosaic images, color test the digital mosaic, and to perform image analysis & corrections.
If you need a refresher on how to select a different billboard image or adjust your grid size and image ratio, please take a look at Part 2 of the Muse Mosaic Getting Started series.
Color Tuning
This feature allows you to to control the balance of colors for your digital mosaic.
1. Blend&Colorize Slider: This slider allows you to control the balance between colorizing the mosaic images (replacing the hue and saturation, but leaving the luminescence intact), or blending (all colors will be blended) the mosaic images to best match the colors of the billboard image.
2. Tuning Intensity: It refers to the level of color correction adjustment for your mosaic images. It allows you to adjust the color corrections of your images to better match the billboard image on the left. Increasing the tuning intensity will make your mosaic images brighter and their colors less prominent. Decreasing the tuning intensity will make your mosaic images darker and their colors more prominent.
3. Live Update: This option allows you to turn on a live preview with placed (temporary) images on the billboard to the left. It allows you to adjust any of the other features within the Color Tuning section. This Live Update feature enables you to adjust how your digital mosaic would look like with your eventual images placed within the digital mosaic using the particular tuning settings configured.
4. Adaptive Tuning: When checked, this option will enable the software to use the tuning intensity you specified and will attempt to automatically adjust the color correction of each of the placed images if color correction is needed, to better match the billboard image for you.
5. Force Grayscale: Selecting this option will force each placed image into a gray scale. The entire digital mosaic will display gray. Please note that if Force Grayscale is enabled, saturation boost and hue will be disabled.
*Image above demonstrating live update with force grayscale.
Coloring Test
This feature allows you to take your Color Tuning Configurations and apply a color test to a library of built-in images. You can also use your own watched folder to generate a preview digital mosaic which you can save as a sample to show to your prospective clients.
1. Built-in library: There are three sets of built-in library images that can be used for the coloring test. If you use the watched folder for testing, it will create a special library of images using the watched folder's images.
2. Mosaic Test: Selecting this button will open a new window using the default photo viewing software on your computer. It will display a preview of a digital mosaic using your selected library of images and your Color Tuning configurations.
ADVANCED
Image Analysis and Corrections
In this section, you adjust the analysis and corrections of your images' edges and increase color saturation. You can also compensate for seemingly black colors in the billboard image by keeping those portions of your mosaic black. Some adjustments affect the placement of your images if you enabled "Optimize placement for color match."
1. Avoid Solid Color Edges: Checking this option will activate the "Edge Correction" functionality. This will change the way images are cropped when added to the mosaic. Sometimes images can have solid colored borders without any "image." Edge correction will do its best to crop out solid colored edges when processing the image.
- Max Percentage of Edge: This feature allows you to adjust how much percentage of edge scanning is to be done to remove plain edges (backgrounds) from your images. A higher percentage will scan more of the image for solid borders.
- Edge RGB Similarity Range (byte): This feature allows you to adjust how similar the colors has to be in order for it to be seen as a colored edge.
The images below illustrate what happens when edge detection is enabled. The image on the left does not have edge detection enabled.
2. Saturation Boost: This feature allows you to boost the saturation of the output tile (placed image) to create a more prominent tile. Negated when Colorize in Color Tuning is set to 100.
3. Include Hue in Analysis (%): This feature allows you to specify in percentage of how much HUE of each pixel in the placed image is to be included when processing the image when "Optimize placement for color match" is enabled in Event Admin > Image Placement.
4. Auto Correct near-black colors: This option will activate the near black detection feature. When a billboard image has black (or near-black) colors, this option will maintain the black when placing an image in that section. A useful option when it's more important that the final mosaic image more closely matches the billboard image, compared to showing detail in placed images. The two images below will illustrate the difference. The image on the left does not correct near-black colors, and retains the detail in the placed images. The image on the right has set the black correction very high, and is retaining the black color of the background image.
- Near-Black RGB Similarity Range: This feature allows you to specify the range of colors converted to black. Some images can have black, or near-black colors in close proximity. The human eye will sometimes register those near-black colors as black, so this option compensates for that.
- Threshold Slider: The threshold slider allows you to indicate what level of near-black would the "near-black auto correct" feature be activated.