PhotoCollage Now in the Philippines
by Bayani S. San Diego Jr., The Philipine Star, April 28, 2000

With the new technology called PhotoCollage, a single picture is now worth a thousand more pictures.

As Ronnie Miranda, the President/Webmaster of Storm Visualization & Imaging (www.stormviz.com) and the man behind this groundbreaking computer technology, would put it: "We gave new meaning and added an exponential value to the old cliché: A picture is worth a thousand words."

In the United States, this technique (called PhotoMosaics) was originally developed by Robert Silvers as a research project when he was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in 1995.

For the Philippine market, Miranda is developing this process as PhotoCollage -- a technique in which thousands of tiny micro-images are arranged to subtly blend together and recreate the details of a single photograph.

Popular examples - all created by Robert Silvers -- of this computer design technique was the Newsweek cover of Princess Diana, the Sports Illustrated cover of Tiger Woods (March 16, 1998), Life magazine's 60th anniversary cover issue, and the poster of the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show.

Princess Diana's Newsweek cover (December 22, 1997) consisted of hundreds or so scanned pictures of flowers that were then artfully arranged to form a stunning photograph of the dearly missed Queen of Hearts. The Truman Show poster, on the other hand, comprised of various movie stills that when put together formed the smiling portrait of ace comedian Jim Carrey. A portrait of Marilyn Monroe was created from Life covers from the past for Life magazine's 60th anniversary issue (October 1996) .

The technology, says Miranda, "is now available commercially in the Philippines." Miranda explains that PhotoCollage is a combination of traditional artist techniques and a custom computer program.

The traditional artist technique is called tiling/mosaics in which the main image is created by using tiles or mosaics. "The smaller micro-images make up these tiles," Miranda adds. "Also, an optional technique is to tint some images to create a smoother blending of micro-images."

Meanwhile, the PhotoCollage program "compares all the available images with each grid of the main photo. The program then picks the tile that is the most visually similar to that particular area. If the number of micro-images in the collection is very limited, it will then tint the closest match to come up with the appropriate tile," Miranda elaborates.

As a powerful visual image, Miranda believes that the PhotoCollage can either serve as a marketing tool (for magazine covers, posters, billboards, and advertisements) or as a unique gift. It is guaranteed to grab everyone's attention with the quality and visual power of each image. Its uniqueness lies in its "visual impact" as an approach in selling a product.

A PhotoCollage can convey more ideas and information, with just one powerful image consisting of a thousand more micro-images. "Furthermore, because of the visual impact, people will be awed and stare at the image," Miranda asserts. "As such, they would never forget your product because they would always remember the PhotoCollage poster."

Miranda shares his own personal experience with the PhotoCollage technique. During his stay in Vancouver, Canada, he had some posters printed at Kinko's -- a major business center that provides photocopying, business printing services, scanning, online services, document creation services, among others, with over 900 retail locations in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, China and Great Britain. Among those posters were PhotoCollage posters of Megastar Sharon Cuneta (created from among 1,000 images of various episodes of Sharon) and Concert Queen Pops Fernandez. (featuring 500 photos of Pops from her concert performances).

"The manager and staff of Kinko's were so impressed by the uniqueness and style of the posters," Miranda recalls. "They thought the Sharon and Pops posters were among the best posters they've printed. So they asked me to make a PhotoCollage poster for them." The Kinko's poster created by Miranda is now displayed prominently in their Canadian store.