The American painter, Chuck Close is famous for his abstract portraits and images comprised of tiny, often geometric, "mosaic tiles" that are arranged to evoke an image when viewed from far away. This MATLAB function provides a quick fix for those who want to emulate Close's style but without putting in all that pesky hard work.
To "install" this function, simply save the chuck_closify.m file to your
computer or clone this repository, and then add the file to your MATLAB path.
This will give you access to a new function, chuck_closify. For inline help,
type help chuck_closify.
The chuck_closify function takes in three required arguments and one optional
argument:
- image (required): an RGB image to be processed. This can either be a filename (string) or an RGB image matrix (rows by columns by 3). This specifies the source image that will be used to create the outputted "painting" image.
- rows (required): a positive integer. Must be smaller than the number of rows of pixels in the original image. This specifies how many rows of mosaic tiles to create in the outputted image.
- columns (required): a positive integer. Must be smaller than the number of columns of pixels in the original image. This specifies how many columns of mosaic tiles to create in the outputted image.
- outfile (optional): a string specifying a filename to write the new image to. The image will be created as a vectorized PDF. Do not specify a file exension-- the extension ".pdf" will be added automatically.
You can use chuck_closify to convert the image earth.jpg into a "painting"
with 25 rows and 30 columns, and save the output to closified_earth.pdf as
follows:
>> chuck_closify('earth.jpg', 25, 30, 'closified_earth');