Review: Make Beautiful Mosaics Using TurboMosaic, They Make Great Gifts!

If you’ve ever knit or crocheted a graphgan, you’re definitely familiar with the concept of a mosaic, “a piece of art or image made from the assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials.” To turn your favorite photograph into a chart (and ultimately a beautiful afghan), you would use an online tool like KnitPro. So what would you use if you wanted to make an amazing picture mosaic? I recently learned about the photo mosaic software TurboMosaic and am giving it a try today.

You can download TurboMosaic as a free trial for Mac or Windows PC. After you download and open it for the first time, you can either continue your free trial or enter your license key. After that you are given the opportunity to watch a tutorial – watch it! Although the software is super-usable and very intuitive, the few minutes you invest in watching the tutorial now will pay off later.

I’m trying the Advanced Edition which allows you to create images for personal, business, and organization use. So for example, you would want this edition of TurboMosaic if you wanted to make a Facebook cover page for your business or an awesome mosaic image for a company brochure. The different licenses are explained here.

I’ve decided to make a mosiac as a gift for my sister-in-law, Jennifer. Last summer we visited Prince Edward Island in Canada and one of the highlights was meeting an amazing guard Llama named Grizwald at an alpaca farm called Green Gables. I thought a nice gift would be a mosaic of Grizwald made up of tiny pictures from knithacker.com.

So first I uploaded a photo of Grizwald as my main photo. From over 20 different size options (including pre-set standards for popular social networking sites like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter), I have chosen to make my final image 18/24 – a great size for framing and shipping.

I chose a circular cell style and uploaded 190 images for the software to generate the mosaic. You don’t have to upload that many pictures – I did because I had them handy in one folder, ready to upload! I had a lot of fun playing around with many of the settings (and you can see the results of your tweaks and changes in real-time, which is useful and saves time) such as the space between the tiles, the degree of cell color, and the level of main picture overlay. With just a few adjustments, I was able to achieve a really cool paint-like effect that suits the subject really well.

In the end, after I had all the settings how I wanted them, the software generated my mosaic in only a couple minutes. My fun picture of Grizwald is made up of 5428 circular cells where each cell is a photo from knithacker.com!

Here is a close-up of the tiny photographs making up Grizwald’s face:

Next I want to try a Facebook cover photo. Because I feature new projects on KnitHacker.com every day, I would love a quick and simple way to keep my Facebook cover image fresh. I try to manage it manually now, and it takes too much time. Luckily, TurboMosaic has the options I’m looking for!

I decided to turn my website logo into a mosaic that will be used as our Facebook cover photo. I set the logo as the main picture and pictures from knithacker.com as tiny pictures. Here’s a screenshot of the generated mosaic zoomed-in to show smaller pictures.

Here is what it looks like on Facebook – pretty good!

All in all, after using TurboMosaic, I believe this software offers good value for the price, and if you’re in the market for a photo mosaic software package, this is a solid choice.

* Please note, I received a copy of Advanced Edition of TurboMosaic for the purpose of providing an honest and unbiased review. This post contains sponsored content.