non-obvious Patent

Firstly, looking back is not a fair way to evaluate how obvious something is.  Regardless, there are at least two ways to think of how obvious it could have been.  One, how big of a jump was it to get to from where we were and two, how many people would see the need for the new software?  Based on the tools that we have been given that can tile and detect color there is not a very large jump to put the technology together especially since people made regular mosaics before photomosaics.  There is a small jump between making a mosaic and making it with all photos and another small jump from making a photomosaic to deciding to make it an automated process (we like to make machines that can "do" things for us).  Those two jumps make the software seem easy to look for.  Joseph Francis made a photomosaic without the software and it seems to me that the next step should have been obvious.