How do you Make Photos Banner Size??

[CeeCee]

I have 4 photos that are currantly 10 x 10 inches at 300 dpi. I need to enlarge them to fit on a banner that will be 8 feet x 22 feet. How do I enlarge these without loosing the resolution on the photos? :confused:

[Jackimalyn]

ummm you cant. you will loose some resolution. But hopefully since its a banner, resolution doesnt have to be that good because people will only see it from far away. Ive printed a lot of banners and youd be surprised how low dpi you can get away with. Ever see a bilboard upclose?? terrible quality... but looks great grom the road

[patkennedy78]

Call the person or shop printing the banner and ask them what dpi they need them at, along with any other print specs.

[SharkFinStudios]

At full size they would most likely need to be at least 150 dpi. In order to have your image be high quality you'd have to have them at a higher res.

Like pat said... ask your printer.

Are all 4 going on ONE banner?

[jimking]

Where's PrintReady? He's the large format man. :confused:

[CeeCee]

The thing is, the client is not the most organized but wants to see a proof now. I am not sure where she is going to get these printed yet. I will be asking her for sure tonight. She brought in some banners that she wants me to match the new banner to, but the banners that she brought in are only 8 feet tall. They are not a good judge on how well the resolution needs to be.

Thanks for all your help guys! Keep any advice coming!!

[Mynock]

You can just mess with it in Photoshop by looking the proportions and changing it to 72 or 100 ppi, and so your 300dpi 10x10 will be 30x30 at 100dpi which will be fine at a distance, but PrintDriver is the real expert.

[jimking]

Damn---I mean PrintDriver. :)

[urstwile]

The important thing to consider here is the viewing distance, as was mentioned already. If this is going to be a billboard, you can get away with the lower resolution, as was also stated.

However, if this is going to be a banner for a tradeshow, that's not necessarily going to fly. The closer the viewing distance, the less you'll be able to get away with.

You could try downloading the demo (fully functioning) version of Genuine Fractals (http://www.ononesoftware.com/download.php) and see if that helps. I've read good reviews about it.

There's also something I've read about upsizing an image in 10% increments a bunch of times. I've never really experimented with it to see if it's a pre-press legend or not, but I've seen a couple of folks on here recommend it.

[urstwile]

Okay, well, I'm bumping this because today I actually had to put this into practice (upsize an image 240% for the final output resolution requirement), and I decided to try three different methods to see which one was better. I was surprised at the result, so I thought I'd share.

The first try was using the Genuine Fractals demo software, for which I still had 18 uses on the demo. It did a nice job, but looked kind of watercolory.

So then I did the 10% increment thing, with Bicubic Smoothing as the interpolation. This did a better job than Genuine Fractals.

Out of curiosity, I decided to see the difference between the 10% increments and the all in one shot with Bicubic Smoothing. And surprise! This was the best of the bunch!

I had an art director with an eagle eye for image quality give me a second opinion and in viewing the three different examples, he agreed that the one shot version (upsize image 240% with Bicubic Smoothing) was the best result of the three. The result was basically similar to what you'd get if you scanned a 35mm transparency up to the size we were going, lots of grain, but it didn't have any stairstepping. If I'd had the time, I would have compared that result with just Bicubic to see the difference, but I might try that on Monday when I'm back to work again.

Anyway, I thought those who often have to do this for large format printing might glean something from this, so I'm sharing my results. :)

[PrintDriver]

The Bicubic options, in fact a whole new interpolation engine, were new with PSCS. A lot of people aren't aware of them.
Smoother for going up. Sharper for going down.

Results always depend on the print process being used.
Always talk to the banner printer and follow their recommendations.

[urstwile]

Agreed, PD, of course. But I was surprised by how good the results were, I was skeptical at first.