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Preparing billboards and other large prints (was: Advice workspace PSD)


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Rene1975

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Hello everyone,

i hope that i can explain myself a little bit so its a little clearly.

u must design a big oject in PSD i learn i must design 1:1 t 300dpi , when start printing i export (safe) the jpeg at 150 dpi so its very sharp.
the object is 6 meters large and 3 meters high


when i do this the file becomes very big!!

What is the best way to do this? i hope that someone can help me with this problem?!

Rene
 
Unfortunately, from your post, I can't determine exactly the situation you are facing, but some of your comments immediately caught my attention:

First, I think you are saying that you are being forced to design what amounts to a small road-side billboard at 1:1 magnification and have the output be at 150 ppi. In 99% of the cases, this is not necessary. These constraints would only be necessary if people would be viewing your very large print from distances of a few feet or less. This would have to be an unusual situation because most people never want to view billboards and other large prints from such a close distance. With few exceptions, people like to see the whole image at once, and if you are just a few feet away, they couldn't possibly see it all at one time.

Second, by suggesting that this large print (aka, "billboard") be designed in Photoshop, and not in a vector-based program such as Adobe Illustrator, you are implying that it contains important photographic-like image(s), not just text and graphics that could be rendered at any size by a vector-based program. If this is true, then I would ask where are you going to find a suitably high resolution source image? Even if you scan an 8x10 negative from a large format view camera on a high resolution drum scanner, you would barely be approaching the pixel dimensions you are suggesting, ie, 35,000 pixels in the long dimension for your image, versus 30,000 pixels for a drum scan of a 8x10" negative.

Third, you may not be aware that commercial printers for such large output sizes use a specialized piece of software called a Raster Image Processor (RIP) engine to allow designers to submit their work in reasonable sizes and not have pixelation be apparent in the final print.

The have been several relevant discussions here on PSG about such issues. Please read through the following:

https://www.photoshopgurus.com/foru...esolutions-post1533679691.html#post1533679691

https://www.photoshopgurus.com/foru...resolution-post1533647964.html#post1533647964

https://www.photoshopgurus.com/foru...resolution-post1533647966.html#post1533647966

https://www.photoshopgurus.com/foru...i-question-post1533704751.html#post1533704751

Once you have read through these, if you have unanswered questions, please feel free to ask.

Best regards,

Tom M
 
Also, you should be aware that I am going to change the title of your post to something more descriptive, so that people searching for similar information in the future will be able to easily find it.

Tom M
Moderator
 
Hello Tom

Sorry, my englsh is not that good!

let me ask it with a different question!?

If must make a design on a billboard...6 meters X 3Meters

What kind of settings do you use in PSD ? the design is a large japanese pictures and koi carps on it, and it must be printed on a large format roland printer.

thanx for your answers!!


kindest regards
rene
 
I'll bet my knowledge of your native language is LOT worse than your knowledge of English, LOL. No problem!

Before I can give you my suggestions, I need some more information:

1) What is the minimum distance people will view it from?

2) Other than text and other hard edged graphic elements, are there any extremely high resolution features in the bitmapped images (eg, the fish or anything else)?

3) Your description of the poster helped, but I still have many questions about it. It would help tremendously if you could post a very low Rez version of the file.

4) What is the maximum width of the specific large format Roland printer that you will be using? What model is it?

5) Is that printer located at a commercial printing house (i.e., so they have the specialized software ( "RIP") that I mentioned), or is it at a smaller facility that probably does not have a RIP engine and only has a printer driver similar to what one might find on home printers?

Thanks,

Tom M
 
People are very close to it
The fish trees etc are high resolution picturesfrom shutterstock
I have a roland sp 540 i 137 cm, and i have ripsoftware from roland
 
Hi Rene -

Sorry it took more time than I thought to get back to you.

Thank you for the information you sent. That's exactly what I needed to know to make some recommendations.

You stated that:

(a) people will be able to view the final print from "very close" distances;

(b) you already have selected the background image.

Item (a) tells me that to appear sharp at such very close distances, your hard-edged graphics (ie, the Japanese logo) must be reproduced at 200 ppi or greater, preferably, more like 300 ppi.

The only way to do this without having enormous file sizes is to prepare the logo in a vector program such as Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw or even Adobe InDesign. The logo should be saved and exported in a file format that supports vector graphics such as *.ai, *.pdf, *.eps, *.svg, etc. PDF is the file format most widely accepted by RIP software.

When prepared this way, the file size for the logo will be small and its size will be exactly the same whether you eventually print it 1 inch across or 6 meters across.

The next question is how to handle the continuous tone (ie, photographic) part of your product -- the background image. Currently, it is 20669 x 10335 pixels. This will become approximately 88 pixels per inch if printed at 6 meters by 3 meters. This is not terribly high resolution, but:

(a) It sounds like you don't have much choice in the matter - you are stuck with this image. Obviously, it will have to be up-rez'ed by about a factor of 3 or 4 in both directions to eliminate pixelation, but whether you up-rez it (say, with a specialized program such as Genuine Fractals), or you let the very capable Roland RIP software (essentially, the printer driver) do the up-rezing, the image will always appear slightly soft when viewed from distances of a foot or less.

(b) The existing image will probably be adequate when printed at your final size as long as the logo and any other hard-edged graphics are sharp. I, and many other people regularly make large prints at 50 ppi, and no one has ever complained that they were soft. See the discussion about this in the nice article that I previously cited:
http://graphicdesign.stackexchange....on-should-a-large-format-artwork-for-print-be

Of course, if you do the up-rez'ing to, say, 300 ppi, you will be forced to deal with 10x larger file sizes, whereas if you let the Roland RIP engine do the up-rez'ing you will only have to deal with the existing size of the background image.

So, my recommendation is to do exactly what is recommended in the articles I cited: Don't use Photoshop, but instead, use a program such as Illustrator that will allow you to bundle both vector and bit-mapped graphics in one PDF file. That gives you the best of both worlds. The logo and other graphic elements will be razor sharp, while the background image will be as sharp as possible, and the file size will be reasonable.

Again, you are facing an extremely common problem, and the solution that I am suggesting is the industry-wide standard way to solve it. The articles that I cited describe this approach (bundling both vector and bit-mapped, continuous tone imagery together in a PDF using Illustrator) in much more detail than I have.

Hope this helps.

Tom M
 
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