Poster Help

[teddymeow]

Hey all,

I have this image:



The resolution is 1024 x 768 with a file size of 356Kb.

Is this acceptable to be blown up and printed to a poster size of A0?

If not can anybody point me in the right direction of a larger version of this image?

Thanks.

[briareos_kerensky]

Is this acceptable to be blown up and printed to a poster size of A0?

Mhmmm...I started by writing "no" but it might be possible.

First, the initial image. It must not have any dithering or interpolation between colours; any format supporting index color (.GIF, .PNG) will be a good start. Of course lossless compressions (.TIF w/ZIP or LZW, .PSD, even .BMP) will work. Lossy formats (first and foremost JPEGs) have to be avoided.

Open such image in Photoshop (or similar program) and proportionally resize it without any anti-aliasing. This SHOULD grant a big image with no dithering between colours (for example no light blue between blue and white in the ocean).
Now you can increase the DPIs and the printing size as require. Again this SHOULD do the trick: in both steps you're asking the program to create things (pixels and DPIs) that aren't there...you're starting from a 1024x768@72 DPI and for the best result you'll need 300DPI at 1x0.8 meters, not exactly the brightest scenario.
I think it's a viable solution because there are no shadings and the source is a grid of pixels, each of its colour and the colour depth is limited.

As 4:3 images and A-series sheets are not proportional with each other, you'll have to crop the image or you'll never know what the print shop could come up with.

Last step would be colour proofing in RGB and/or CMYK for printing. RGB should be quite painless and essentially all print shops should accept RGB images; CMYK would be the way to go but you'll have to correct some of the colours (I think green and blue will give most problems).

However in the back of my mind a voice is constantly telling "no, it won't work"...massive resizes is something that should always be avoided, especially if you try to keep DPI constant or increasing them.
But A0 is quite large, maybe you want to see it from the distance: in this case you should go no lower than 72 DPI...well, even 50 DPI will work if the watching distance will be great.

[edit] And let's not forget the possibility to trace the image...it shouldn't be much work, there are a lot of repeated elements and you can divide everything into coloured squares if your vector skills aren't good enough. Any vector program with a grid will do the trick; once you have a vector image, you can stretch and resize it however you want.

[noobish hat]

I'm barging in here to say that this would make a great poster:

[fuse]

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that this is relevant to your interests: http://mudron.bigcartel.com/

[EvilBoris]

I think that image has already been resized in the past, so it has lost it's true pixally form.

You want to try and find a different sized version of that image that hasn't had that done. Perhaps a PNG file.

EDIT

Found it

Main.png



If you are getting it printed somewhere they will may well increase the image size, so I would perhaps resize it yourself or give them a vector file.

http://www.drububu.com/tutorial/bitmaptovector.html

Drag and drop the image into this site ,choose SVG and drag the bar all the way to the left and choose save

[CMcK]

You need Rasterbator.

[teddymeow]

Cheers guys.

Much appreciate the help.

[112]

Wow I've learnt so much from this thread and at the same time got confused... But good thread non the less!

Let us know how you get on.

112