Tile Tweaks

Picture Medley provides a few tricks to help tiles match the target image a little more closely. All of these tweaks are done to the tiles without any prior knowledge of how they might be used in the final Medley. Each of these techniques creates additional virtual copies of tiles, but every effort is still made to avoid tiles appearing more than once in the final Medley.

• None: No tweaks are applied to tiles to improve matching
• Nudges: Tiles are slightly cropped in one of 9 directions, enabling the software to pick the best of 10 possible alignments.
• Tile Portions: Multiple areas are extracted from each tile and used to improve match quality. Read on below for more information about how this option works.
• Exposure: Multiple exposure settings (brightness & contrast) are calculated form each tile and used to improve match quality. This simulates different camera settings that could have been used when the photo was originally taken.
• Tints: Tiles are tinted slightly to help improve match quality. This simulates different lighting conditions that could have affected the coloring in the original photo.

Tile Portions

By default, the software will only use the largest possible square region from the center of the source image. If you select the "Tile Portions" option in "Tile Tweaks", additional smaller squares will be taken from the same source image, and enlarged so that all tiles are the same size. This is illustrated below.

How Tiles Are Re-used

• 
  Figure 2: The original Source Image
• 
  Figure 3a: Primary Crop Area
• 
  Figure 3b: Secondary Crop Areas

Let's say that the image shown in Figure 2 is among the Source Images selected for this medley.

Figure 3 shows the regions that are available for medley tiles.

• The red square will be used by default.
• If "Re-use Tile Portions" is selected, the blue squares will additionally be used.

• 
  Figure 4: Primary Crop
• 
  Figure 5: Secondary Crops

Figure 4 shows the primary crop, used by default. Figure 5 shows the secondary crops, used if "Re-use Tile Portions" is selected.

When Should I Use This?

The Medley technique works best with a large assortment of images. If you don't have enough images to populate each tile location uniquely, the software will give you the opportunity to repeat tiles as needed to fill the medley. Re-using tile portions is a useful way to help the repeated tiles be slightly different from each other, which will improve the perceptual quality of the final output.