Lego pixels in my brain

I've been playing around with making lego-flavoured images.. that is, images pixelated and resized to make lego mosaics out of. It's proving to be a lot harder than I thought.

Eric Harshbarger has a Pixelego Viewer which is a java applet that converts an image into a lego-flavoured one. Unfortunately it requires stuffing around with text files, and you have to get your image to the right size before applying the applet to it so that you end up with the right number of pixels.

Lugnet also has a mosaic maker where you can select the colours of lego you have and the width in pixels you want it to be. The big disadvantage is you have to upload each image you want to play with to a valid url for it to grab, and if you want to fiddle with the colours at all you have to do it, resave it, and reupload it. Fiddly.

James suggested I try Mazaika, but it pixelates things far too much and I haven't been able to get good results with it. It's really designed for huge image databases, not 48x48 pixel images with 16 colours.

So far the best luck I've had is loading the image in photoshop, reducing the number of colours, then tweaking the colour table so the pixels match lego coloured pieces. But that's really only easy with clip art or very simple images. Photos tend to look very wierd when you make colours into what they're not. You really need the dithering on photos.

So. Not getting anywhere very fast, and it's late.