Base image
Unlike conventional photography services that print large scale images to paper or canvas, we can accept small images to work from. This is due to the nature of our mosaics. As the final artwork that we deliver is made from thousands of images its definition is far greater than standard photos, so pixilation doesn’t occur - even at substantial sizes.

Guidelines
Of course, the better your initial photo, or base image, the higher the quality of your final mosaic. Here are some tips:

• Any picture can be used but the best shots are those where the subject fills the photograph, with their features clearly visible. Eyes are particularly important.
• Although not essential, photos that are in focus generally produce better results as we can key in to more detail.
• Generally the size of the photo isn’t important, unless a much smaller area from within the original shot is to be used. All of the mosaics featured on our site are based on photos taken with digital cameras under 2 mega pixels.
• We’ve found that its common for customers to have more than one favourite photo in their collection. If you can’t decide which main image to use, send us a selection and we’ll help you pick the best one. Alternatively, we can combine them in to one base image.
• The colour balance of your base image should reflect the overall colour palette of your collection as closely as possible. Don’t worry if you feel the colours don’t match accurately as we can modify the image during our pre-production phase and slightly adjust the tone of each photo in your library where suitable. Alternatively and in addition to full colour mosaics, we can develop monotone or combined colour/monotone images that require less colour-matching.

In sending us your photos you warrant that you own the copyright or that you have permission from the copyright owner to use the images.

Photo library
Our images comprise of approximately 2,500 individual photos, or cells. This varies from picture to picture and depends on the size of the subject, the size of the printed display and the total number of unique photos in your library. Unless you have a collection that has this number of unique photos repeated cells will occur in the mosaic, as is often the case. We take great care in ensuring that the same image doesn’t appear close to itself, unless this is something you require.

When taking photos it's common to take several pictures of the same subject in sequence so that the best shot can be chosen at a later stage. During the preparation of your library we will filter out similar photos leaving only the highlights from a sequence. Although this reduces the apparent number of repeats in the mosaic, remember that it also reduces the total number of photos we can use from your library.

We can, however, increase the number of shots in your library by as much as 500%. It's therefore possible to create spectacular, deeply personal mosaics from as few as 100 unique photographs. We don’t water down a library with stock images as this weakens the personal nature of your artwork.

File formats
Although we can accept your base image in several formats - prints, negatives, slides or digitally - your library of photos must be sent to us on disk. We can work with many formats, so don’t hesitate to send us file types that aren’t listed here. Our preferred formats include:

• TIFF - A highly popular file format that we can easily use.
• JPG - if you’ve output these from a graphics package make sure you saved them with minimal compression so that the information contained within the image is preserved.
• BMP - no loss of information. Compress to a .zip or .rar file to reduce file size without loss of data.