The top box provides the settings for colour and quality, the bottom box for size and shape.The following settings are available:

• Quality: the accuracy of how many tiles are used for a tile selection. A lower quality results in a higher speed but also a slightly less colour matching of each tile with the source picture colour. A good value is 80%.
• Minimum distance: the minimum allowed distance between the same tiles in the mosaic. This is a target value and may not be chived for all tiles. In case when e.g. large areas of similar colours are part of the source picture (e.g. blue sky), there may bot be enough well-fitting pictures in the library to cater for the minimum distance, and the pictures may be placed next to each other after all. A good value is 10-12 tiles.
• Colorize: the mosaic takes the colour of the source picture but keeps the luminance of the tiles. This way a very good colour matching can be achieved, but at the cost of looking awkward because tiles gets an unnatural colour (specially people faces may look weird if colorize is set to a high value). A good value is between 30 and 50%.
• Original: the amount of blending with the original picture. This blend should be set to low values to avoid that the source picture is peeking through too much, obscuring the individual tiles. The source picture is always blurred before it's blended, effectively also removing the sharp resize edges. For this reason a too large source picture is not required because the blurring will also reduce the resizing pixelation is for instance the mosaic size is 1920 and the source is 600 pixels in size. A good value is between 15 en 25%.
• Colour engine: this is the engine that is used to define the tiles for the mosaic. There are 4 engines available, each having an advantage and some disadvantages
  • Random tiles: the tile is selected from a small range of best fitting tiles, not always the best fit is selected. Advantage: randomly selected tiles will certainly avoid that many same best fit tiles will not be placed adjacent to each other. Disadvantage: adjacent tiles are not managed, so in large similar coloured areas adjacent tiles may frequently occur.
  • Optimized distribution: from the randomly placed layout a repair 'wave' is started to remove adjacent tiles, and replace them with similar tiles, also best fitting. Advantage: adjacent tiles will be less, but patterns of tile ares may occur. Output is not predictable. In some cases this engine prevails over the 'Random tiles' , but equally vice versa.
  • Force to use all pictures: this engine will relentlessly use all the pictures in the current library (only at start when creating the initial mosaic). This may have severe consequences: when the amount of library pictures is almost equal to the required amount in the mosaic the result can look drastically awful. When the amount of pictures is very low, e.g. a factor 5 lower, the result can be pretty nice, but still worse as with the previous two engines. The advantage is that all pictures are used (in case the client wants to show all pictures in the library for some reason), the disadvantage is obvious: little colour matching ability. There may be a good reason for ruining it anyway: when starting with an awfully bad colour matching, and new library files are provided by snapshots, the mosaic can be improved with each new picture. This would be a nice effect,e.g. to reveal a new logo or to start a little contest of who will identify the text that is written in the mosaic (and is slowly revealed with each new tile).
  • Full randomization: the application will not make a colour matching mosaic, but simply randomly build a mosaic from a randomly selected tile. Th end result is a mosaic that has no resemblance to whatsoever. Advantages: like with 'Force to use all pictures' this can be used to slowly build a mosaic. Disadvantage... no mosaic?
• Cell size (in pixels): the size of each tile ('cell') in the mosaic. The size is quite important: to large will result in a very large mosaic, perhaps too large to fit in the monitor, and resizing will result in smaller cell size anyway. So to set the correct size is a matter of taking the monitor size also into account. Too small will result in a bad picture quality, where individual tiles can hardly recognized. A good size is 32-60 pixels.
• Amount (horizontal): the amount of tiles on the horizontal size of the mosaic. The amount of vertical tiles is automatically calculated from the aspect ratio of the source picture. Also here the amount is quite important: too many tiles will results in a large mosaic, but quite good matching with the source, but too little amount will result in a decrease of mosaic likeliness with the source picture.
• Aspect ratio: the width:height ratio of each tile in the mosaic. It is good practice to use the same aspect ratio of each tile as that of the source picture, but all options are equally interesting. At the end it's a matter of taste.
• Revert flying path: the default direction is to start large, and then fly into the mosaic. When this option is checked the path reverts: it starts small, gradually flying out and then fades away.
• Flying path: this is the way the tile will move from full screen to the final destination and size. There are three different paths; and a fourth option to randomly select a path movement. Default is 'Random'.
• Accuracy: this parameter is comparable to the 'Quality' parameter of the mosaic. It is basically an indicator to what extent the perfect fit of the new snapshot 'tile' placement may deviate. This is particularly useful when e.g. a booth with a constant colour background is used, and with little colour variation, and each snapshot would then be placed in always the same optimized place in the mosaic. To avoid such a repeated placement, a more randomly selected fit (but still a good fit) is allowed. The value of accuracy has not best value. It's a bit trial and error what could be a good value. A good starting value however is 60-80%.
• Start size: the percentage of the full screen size when a tile is shown. A value of 100% means that the tile is filled until the monitor screen is almost fully showing the tile. It will anticipate on landscape and portrait aspect ratios/ A 100% value still leaves a small rim between the monitor edges and the tile. The range is between 100% and 20%.  
• Flying tile size: several tile 'clusters' can be activated. The default is 1x1 tile (or simple one tile at the time), but also 2x2, 3x3, etc can be selected ('manifold tiles'). The advantage is that mosaic build-up goes faster. When a manifold is selected (so: no 1x1 tile) the initial mosaic is not shown and replaced by an uniform colour of the selected background colour (default: black). In this case the mosaic is gradually being built-up. Some aspects to understand:
  • Make an estimation of how long the mosaic completion will take, and set the timer for the commercial ('Interlude') to a value far greater than the time to complete the mosaic. When a commercial starts also a new mosaic will be made, possibly not having completed the old one.
  • Upon completion of the mosaic the commercial will be activated automatically. This is to draw attention at completion, providing an excellent moment to show the sponsored messages. After the message a new mosaic is generated, recoloured  and mosaic build-up starts all over again.
  • The manifold tile combinations will be placed randomly; so with each dynamic step it's unpredictable which part is being placed.
  • When the number of manifolds does not fit in the current mosaic size, the right and bottom edges are partly repeated. For instance when the mosaic size is 24 x 18 tiles, and the 4x4 manifold is selected, the number of horizontal tiles is 24/4 = 6 parts, but the vertical tiles need one more to fill the 2 remaining tiles: 18/4 = 4 tiles of 4x4 + 1 tile of 4x4 overlapping 2 rows.

Picture above: manifolds in a frame. From left to right: 2x2, 3x3 and 5x5 pictures

• Clear: the mosaic will be wiped after initialisation and fully replaced with the currently active background colour. This way a mosaic can be build-up from new pictures, or from existing pictures in the currently active library folder. More information is provided in the chapter on 'Recipes for dynamics'.
• Use new image after Interlude: by default the mosaic is not rebuilt with a new random image after an Interlude has finished. To allow this feature, you first need to activate this option here, so a new mosaic image will be used after an Interlude action.
• Stop adding images after mosaic has completed : in some cases, e.g. after starting with a clean viewer (so: no mosaic yet, which is being built up during the event), you can stop the mosaic of replacing tiles with new images. The process is not really stopped: the flying in/out is suppressed and also the shape dynamics trigger is suppressed. It's recommended to test this with a small mosaic size, e.g. 8 tiles on the horizontal, and highly paced image dynamics. Only then you are sure that during an event the image is not erased, restarted or otherwise replaced. When this option is active, the amount of placed and total tiles is indicated in the GUI. To be sure no accidental erasing happens, the techie should stop the mosaic dynamics after the mosaic has been completed, and use the 'Test animation' button to manually invoke shape animations.

Settings example

Example of tweaking the cell size, the amount of tile and the aspect ratio to a good fit with the monitor size.

Suppose the monitor has 1650 x 1050 pixels, thus an aspect ratio of 11:7, a very uncommon value. The mathematical value would then be 11/7 = 1.57. We first prepare a source picture with this aspect ratio. This is the picture we will use (dimensions: 825 x 525 pixels):

To match the source picture size and all the mosaic settings to precisely fit the full mosaic on this monitor can be calculated as follows:

Approach 1:

We start with a trial and error mosaic creation. We start with a tile size of 50, thus 1650/50 = 33 tile son the horizontal, and therefore 21 on the vertical. The amount of tiles are integer numbers so we can expect that the mosaic will fully cover the screen, with no black edges top/bottom or left/right. This is the first mosaic result:

The mosaic is quite good, also because of 40% colorize and 20% original blend.

Approach 2:

We start with the amount of tiles: 50. This will lead to a cell size of 33, which fits on the horizontal (1650/33 = 50), but won't fit on the vertical: 1050/33 = 31.8. Since the application uses normal rounding-off maths the amount of tile on the vertical will become 32. This combination will lead to a slightly lower aspect ratio, resulting a small black lines left and right of the mosaic on the monitor: the mosaic size will be 1650 x 1056 pixels (32 x 33 = 1056). Although 3 pixels left and right can basically be ignored, we can still repair some of this 'damage' by tweaking the aspect ratio of each tile.

We will now increase the aspect ratio step by step. At first nothing happens with the mosaic size (this can be found below the miniature picture top-left of the GUI) because the number of tiles on the vertical will still not change to a different number. When the aspect ratio reaches the value of 1.11 the mosaic size is then perfectly set to 1650 x 1050 again. See screen shot below.

When the initial mosaic is now created and saved you will notice that the mosaic size is exactly as indicated: 1650 x 1050. It will now perfectly fit on the monitor screen again. The tiles are slightly landscape but this should be not a problem. Most importantly: because the amount of tile on the horizontal is significantly higher than the first approach the overall impression of the mosaic is extremely accurate.