First time printing large - any tips for a beginner?

macs

macs

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Rich
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I have been asked by my sister to have one of my images printed large for her birthday present. She wants it to go over the mantelpiece in the living room of the house she is in the process of buying. After the effect of being flattered had faded, it occurred to be me that this is the first of my image that will be on display anywhere other that in small frames in my house (most of which are family snaps anyway) so I thought I'd ask for some advice from people who have done this before.

I am thinking of using DSCL to do the printing as I use them for my smaller prints and find their service to be good and professional. With this in mind I will download their printer profile and soft proof the image before placing the order. Is there anything else I should be doing?

Out of interest, which of my images on Flickr would people choose to print? She's left the actual image choice up to me but with the brief of "I like big sweeping views" and "But I'd like it to be Derbyshire or Notts ideally".

Thanks everyone.
 
Photobox is generally always good, they always have offers on :) even when you sign up for multiple accounts with different email addresses :)
 
I've just bought the credit for a large canvas at Photobox as it was too good an offer to pass up.

markmullen said:
Make sure you've properly dust spotted the sky, if you've not already, you don't want to print out a dust bunny.
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Thanks for that tip - I will certainly do that before I place the order.


Anyone else got tips for getting the best results when printing large?
 
Prepare your photo to size/ratio that you're having it printed at... so there's no surprises when you upload and find you're cropping where you hadn't intended...
 
sunnyside_up said:
Prepare your photo to size/ratio that you're having it printed at... so there's no surprises when you upload and find you're cropping where you hadn't intended...
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Hmm, yeah good idea. I hadn't thought of that, although it's going to be a canvas so hard to know what they will include and what they won't on the front of the canvas itself and bot of the sides.
 
macs said:
Hmm, yeah good idea. I hadn't thought of that, although it's going to be a canvas so hard to know what they will include and what they won't on the front of the canvas itself and bot of the sides.
Click to expand...

You should be able to find out how much is lost for the wrap...
 
macs said:
.... hard to know what they will include and what they won't on the front of the canvas itself and bot of the sides.
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If you use Perfect Resize you can have the whole of the image on the front of the canvas and the sides can be made up of an added mirror (or a solid colour)
 
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If your resizing for a canvas print the resolution requirements are significantly different.. before doing any resizing check what the native resolution of your image is at the required canvas size, if it's 150 pixels/inch or greater there's no need to resize as canvas prints are much less detailed than paper... if you're not 100% sure about this it's worth checking with DSCL beforehand

Simon
 
Some printers offering a canvas will offer the option of mirroring the edges of your image so that there is no cropping involved, while others will wrap a portion of the image around the frame, cropping and potentially spoiling your picture. Make sure you know what you're being offered and which you want.

I had a couple of canvases printed recently with a company that wrapped instead of mirroring, and the process I used so as not to lose the edges of my image was as follows:

In Lightroom export the image at 300dpi to the size of the print plus a small overage. In my case the image ratio was 3:2 so I exported with the longest side at 24.2 inches for a 24" X 16" canvas. Exported as an 8 bit tif, RGB because that was the format the printer required.
The printer had specified a final image size in pixels to include the excess to wrap around the frame. In GIMP I created a blank image exactly that size, then imported the image from lightroom as a layer - this automatically centred up on the blank image.
Finally exported from GIMP as an 8 bit RGB tif and uploaded to the printers site. About 4 working days later the canvases came back - perfect, and with a white edge on the side where it was wrapped. (y)

It may not have been necessary to have the prints created at a full 300dpi, but it also does no harm, and the images were lovely & detailed, even right up close.

HTH
 
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