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I am looking at doing a large print and would welcome some advice on anything I should do to prepare the image for printing. My image is 3458 x 2593 pixels so the first question would be: is it big enough?
Assuming it is should I be looking to resize it and perhaps apply additional sharpening?
Any pointers would be most welcome.
Many thanks in advance.
Phil
PS I will be offline for most of the day so I won't be able to respond until later this afternoon.
By the time you take that up to 40x30 inches it works out to be 86.45dpi, which is a little on the low side. In my experience anything below 100dpi starts to show pixelation, so if you interpolate it up to at least that then you should be ok. Don't go over the top though because the results can look horrendous.
If you have Photoshop, you can enlarge your image pixels with virtually no loss. This is the way to do it....
Copy your background layer > Windows > Actions > Create new action > (Name) resize 110% > (Function key) F11 > Press record button > Image > Image size > (Document size) Change centimeters to percentage > Width 110 > Click OK > Click on stop recording. Now, every time you want to enlarge an image, press F11 and your image will enlarge by 10%.
If you need me to explain anything, let me know.
Stephen
When She-who-must-be-obeyed needed to prep a 15 x 3 foot canvas from a 12 MP camera file, she used Genuine Fractals from On One to do the enlargement. She decided on a final resolution of 180 dpi which gave a nice result. The folk at On One are great to deal with so visit their stand at FOCUS.
Don't do any sharpening until after you've made the enlargement. We always do a "small" test print - say a 16 x 12 inch - before going for any very large prints.
Before going to print, scrutinise the whole picture area at 100% magnification because it's surprising what you can miss!
Quote: I just send Paul the original image, and let his RIP software upscale and sharpen for the print
I have to agree with letting the printer do the upsizing for you. Their upscaling software is obviously optimised for their print machines.
Also, I imagine that your large print will be viewed from a greater distance than you would view a regular size print from so that's going to help with the lack of pixels.
For obvious reasons, She-who-must-be-obeyed did some very careful testing before the 15 x 3 foot canvas was printed. She did a comparison of Genuine Fractals versus the printer's RIP. GF was way ahead but you'd need to buy a copy.
I also have a question. Having taken images, most them straight out of the camera are around 3-4mb. After working on them in CS3 they increase in size from 5-12 mb depending on the processes used. Obviously when then uploading they take a much longer time to uplpoad especially as today I had 230 images to upload.. How do I reduce the file size, in order to keep the upload time reasonable? What effect will reducing the size of the file have on quality.
€olin Tx
With JPEG there is a correlation between file size and quality. I use Save For Web in Photoshop and compare the original to the compressed as I slide the quality slider. Moving the slider down you can see your file size decrease, you can see the effect on the image. I find jpeg artefacts first appear on outlines and in the reds.
Have a look at the bottom of this page http://ephotopros.com/articles/article-archives/articletype/articleview/articlei...
and you can see the guy has four images compared at different qualities.
Best thing you can do is experiment with Save For Web. Make sure the first thing you do is switch from GIF to JPEG. If you have a decent PC you can ignore the warning about your files being too big for SFW
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