Essential photo editing tricks for landscapes: 10 Make a 'Dotscape'
Conventional landscape photography can sometimes seem a little over-familiar, so why not use Photoshop to give your shots a different look, such as the 'dotscape' treatment above?
Owing a little to Damien Hirst and George Seurat, this combination of pattern and filter effects turns a scene into a series of coloured dots, and looks great when printed large.
The Mosaic filter (Filter>Pixelate>Mosaic) reduces an image to a series of coloured squares. Apply this over your chosen image first. Find a cell size that works well for your image.
Go to File>New and set the width and height to exactly the same number of pixels as the cell size, with Background Contents set to White.
Grab the Elliptical Marquee tool and then draw a circular selection that touches the edges of the white square, then press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+I to invert it and Cmd/Ctrl+J to copy it to a new layer.
Now hide the Background layer, then go to Edit>Define Pattern. Go back to your main image and then go to Layer>New Fill Layer>Pattern, hit OK and choose your newly created dot pattern.
For the finishing touch, simply increase the size of the canvas (Image>Canvas size) to make a white border.
