Hello,

I might do a job which will require a print size of 5.5x3.5 meters. All I have for the job is a Nikon D2X, nothing else. What you people recomend to be able to do it.

I'm thinking of making the photo in RAW then convert to .tiff and do interpolation risizing in photoshop, I heard is as good as any of the other programs out there like the Fractal software (I don't remember the right name).

Am I right? Up to how much can I risize with photoshop to be able to make this large size print, buy the way I'm not going to print it, I will make the photos and provide the material (file).

Any tips and insight on how you'll do it? Remember I can only use my D2X (won't be renting any medium format camera or film).

Thanks

Hi Jose,

don't worry too much about this problem. A Poster of that size will usually be watched from "across the road", so resolution is not that much of a problem. Ask the guys who do the printing if you should upres the picture or if the printer software takes care of that. And ask them, what resolution they require. At that size often 20dpi is enough, so don't try to have 300dpi at the final print size. The resulting file would blow your harddrive to pieces.

If you have to upres the file, use the feature provided by Adobe Camera Raw. It works quite well. In a second step you can then use PS or another software to further increase the file size.

Hope this helps a bit.

The general rule of thumb is that you can print anything any size so long as you have 2X the dpi of applicable line screen of the image.

Firstly, you can upsample the original TIFF image by 10% several times and then let the stochastic screening of the printer device handle the rest.

10% happens to be a magic number which seems to mainting image quality. Apparent it is better to upsample 8X at 10% each time than 100% once.

If the effective line screen of a billboard is 30lpi (in the traditional format) then the required resolution is 60dpi.

It may not show Castro trying to push Russian missles into Cuba but it will give no loss of quality to Lara Croft.

In CMYK it amounts to something like 410MB using 60dpi. Given that I publish 120cm panorama prints in HIGH detail at 110dpi I might be a little conservative.

I might be a little late to the party here, but you could perhaps try to take several shots and stitch them together?