Is there an overkill with pixel size and max samples for printing ?
montrealfilmguy
Posts: 127
in New Users
Ive been going up nowadays to print some of my work.
This morning i did a 3000 W by 4000 . Is too too much and sort of useless on lets say around 8 by 11 prints or at the most 11 x 14 ?
Merci bien.
Comments
300 DPI (dots per inch) is a pretty standard resolution for printing, so multiply each dimension by 300 to determine what resolution you should render at. 11 x 300 is 3300, 14 x 300 is 4200, so you're not far off with the render you already did.
Cool. Thanks Gordig.
I was also trying to establish the overkill pixel size so that i it gets useless to wait a lot of hours more for nothing.
I'll stick with around 3000 x 4000.
To get a larger print drop the DPI. The farther away from the picture you have to be to view it all the lower you can set the DPI, it doesn't need to be 300dpi or even 600dpi. A roadside billboard can be as low as 4dpi as it is being viewed from a distance.
With a really good printer, most people wouldn't be able to discern even 175dpi, if you are really in a pinch and people won't be treating it as an artwork they are gonna stare at for hours. Try it out. Below 150dpi is where it really gets noticeable.
<OT> I had a thing yesterday where I wanted to make an area of rasterized bitmap print GRAY (like a pencil, like a halftone) using just black ink with the quality set to high. I took a chance and set up a square area with a half-tone fill (two colour, black and white polka dots in Corel Draw) and exported it as a bitmap. This was a bit of a challenge as Corel Draw does not allow particularly small dot fills - so I had to increase the size of the ARTWORK after selecting the smallest possible pattern fill. Kapisch?
I exported this square area big - 8,000 pixels across say.
Then I went in with Magic Wand in an image editor, and I copied the WHITE area between the dots. I laid this over the artwork that I wanted to be "gray" and again, played with the relative sizes - negative white screen area smaller and underlying artwork bigger.
Bingo - my garden grade inkjet printer was able to easily discern the hundreds of dpi of white space with ease and it printed the dime-sized area noticeably gray. Like graphite or something... which is what I wanted as it was supposed to be a pencil stroke.
Moral - even though you don't need super detail for a billboard-sized printout that's going to be viewed from several feet away, you can still do a lot with various interference patterns and these printers will dance to your tune, altering the close-up appearance of various sections of your image.
In particular I have always been impressed by the way the ink jets do "snow" on a sunny day with blue skies - eg. very fine randomly applied dots of azure blue usually.
</OT>