Help on UpResing for 20 ft. Print

[illy]

Hello everyone. I hope that some of you can help me out.

My company is opening a retail store for RV and Camping equipment. We are trying to create 6 large posters that will be 20 ft. Wide by 7 ft. Tall around the walls inside the store. I have images that are 4.6 inches Wide at 1800 dpi. I know this is a HUGE Up-Res from such a small image. Is it possible to do it without too much loss?

We purchased Genuine Fractal and have been messing around with it. The printer we are working with needs the file at half the print size at 300 dpi, so this would be 10 feet by 3.5 feet. I simply took the original image, cropped it to the correct proportions to match the final image requirements, and slowly began to up the image size with Genuine Fractal at about 150% at a time. We then gave the printer the final image for a test print, but the results were pretty dissapointing.

My question is, are we going about this the correct way? If not, what way should we do it? Any tips, suggestions and help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance guys.

[Ted Harris]

illy, some moe questions before I attempt to answer your original question. What is the size of the original film? How was it scanned, what scanner and at what resolution? Or, is theoriginal a digital file and if so how was it captured?

Without this info on the original image and the capture it is very difficult to give you ameaningful answer. The size you are shooting for could be very difficult so I need the info to give you a sound answer. Further, how big is the space where these will be displayed ... important to know how far away from the viewers the images wil be on average.

[illy]

Thanks for the reply already Ted.

As for the original files, they are digitally manipulated images that were given to me at the max size the photographer had them at, which was 4.6 inches Wide at 1800 dpi. The height is cropped anyways, so I am guessing it doesn't matter whether or not I give you that dimension. As for how the digital was captured, I can not be too sure how they were prepared and edited. The file format of the images is .tif and they were around 150-200 MBs in file size. The images we are using can be seen at http://www.andyandersonphoto.com under 'New Work -> Go RV'.

The posters themselves will be displayed at about 10 feet above the ground and they will span 20' wide across the wall and 7' high.

I hope that this is enough information for you because that is the extent of my knowledge on the files themselves.

Thanks again. Looking forward to your reply.

[Bruce Watson]

We are trying to create 6 large posters that will be 20 ft. Wide by 7 ft. Tall around the walls inside the store. I have images that are 4.6 inches Wide at 1800 dpi. I know this is a HUGE Up-Res from such a small image. Is it possible to do it without too much loss?

That's 1800ppi * 4.6 = 8280 pixels, 8280p/84 in ~ 100 ppi. Not too bad as long as people will be decently far away and it sounds like that will be the case. Sample prints viewed at arms length won't look good however. You'll need to judge them at the closest distance one of your patrons could get which should be considerably farther away than arms length.

Just to clarify, you shouldn't loose anything at all. What you'll end up doing is spreading the information you have over a fairly large distance. You'll be diluting it, if you will.

At the risk of sounding officious, I strongly suggest that you have someone with experience making big prints from less than optimum files do the work. Screwing up a print this size is going to be costly. Why isn't the photographer in question making or directing the making of the prints? Who better to know what it's supposed to look like than the photographer?

[chris jordan]

Hi Illy, here are a few tips. First, do not do any kind of digital sharpening to the file before up-ressing. If you did that already, start over. Up-res the original "soft" scan to the final print size and resolution, then sharpen it from there. Start with a large radius (maybe 20.0 or so), low amount (5-10%) and no threshold. That should give you a little bit of a contrast "pop" that will make the image appear sharper. Then go to a smaller radius, like 2.5, a larger amount (200%) and a threshold in the range of 4 or so. You'll have to do some experimenting, but that general approach will give you the sharpest possible results for a print that big.

Also remember that it doesn't have to look good right up close, so if you are making proofs and looking at them at arm's length and they look terrible, don't worry. The print has to look good at viewing distance only, which for a huge print like that is at least several paces away. I've been amazed the few times I've gotten to look at billboards up very close. From a distance they can look tack sharp and beautiful; up close the pixels are as big as golf balls and you can barely tell what the image is. Stand back at 60 feet again, and it turns back into a tack-sharp photograph.

Good luck!

[illy]

Thanks for your input Bruce. I have tried to contact Andy Anderson Photography and they told us that they have never done prints that big and do not know the best way to prepare the images to the size we need them. The best advice he gave us was to open them in photoshop and start upressing them manually through the 'image size' window. Too bad that wasn't very helpful to us.

Anyways, the process in which I used to begin upresing the images was opening one of the image files in Photoshop (4.616 inches x 3.637 inches at 1800 PPI), then going to 'image -> image size' then unchecking 'Resample Image' then setting the PPI to 300 which makes the document 27.697 inches Wide automatically. From there, I cut it down to 27 inches Wide, then crop the image to exactly 27 inches x 9.45 inches (exact proportion to the final size of 20 feet x 7 feet). From there, I open up the Genuine Fractal plugin and then start increasing the image size at about 150% at a time until it is finally 10 feet x 3.5 feet.

I'm wondering if I am doing the right thing by setting the original image resolution to 300 at the start with the 'Resample Image' unchecked.

Anyways, any other help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you guys once again.

[illy]

Thanks for the helpful tips on sharpening Chris. It is much appreciated.

[Ted Harris]

illy, you are headed in the right direction and I agree with what chris and Bruce hace already told you. I want to underscore the comment about getting help from someone who makes large images such as this or you will definitely uffer in term sof quality and your wallet.

My recommendation would be Jon Lattimor www.ejarts.com . Jon is a master digital printer and teaches at RIT. Additionally he has a shop setup to make the prints you need and even give you some options ont he type of print.

[Ken Lee]

Ted -

The web site www/ejarts.com behaves rather strangely on Mac, in both Safari and Firefox. There seems to be some kind of infinite loop - either that, or it is written to support Internet Explorer or something strictly Microsoft-centric. You might want to pass that along.

[Ted Harris]

Duhhhhhh ... fixed my typo. I think if you try www.ejarts.com you will find that it works fine. Jon is a mostly Mac shop so it should work fine and I just tried it and all was well. What I get for typing in front of the TV.