PLEASE HELP! -Producing file for billboard printing

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Melmoth71

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Miguel
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Hi all, I could definitely use some help with a printing issue.

I have won a commission for one of my black and white photos to be printed as a large (28 x 10.5 metres) banner and placed on the facade of a large arts organisation, so I'm over the moon with excitement but there seems to be a problem with the printing process.

The file for the printing company is being produced by a volunteer graphic designer but neither he nor the arts organisation are experts at producing images for billboards/banners and I have no experience whatsoever of this sort of thing, so we seem to be lost at the moment and I'm terrified of losing this opportunity.

The problem is that the printing company is telling us that when the original image is blown up to the size required for the printing, the quality is not good enough. The graphic designer has used Photoshop and Perfect Resize to blow up the image. The printing company's team have also produced an enlargement they say is not good enough.

My original (monochrome) file (resized to fit the banner's proportions) is from my Nikon D60 DSLR at maximum res, it's 3872x1450 pixels big. The designer says the image has to be blown up to 16535 pixels wide which he hasn't managed to do with the required quality.

I came up with the idea of printing my photo with the best quality possible (maybe as a 12x4 inch print), then scanning the print with a high-res scanner to produce a much larger file. Would this be possible?? Would it produce a good enough image?

What other options could I try??

Any help would be hugely appreciated. The arts organisation wants to get the printing done as soon as possible.

Thanks a million in advance.
Miguel
 
Would the photo stand up to conversion to vector artwork?
 
I don't know. It's not a simple design, it's a black and white photo with lots of detail. From what I've read you have to use the pen tool etc but wouldn't a photo be too complex for that?
 
Thank you very much for this, I've never done anything like this before and I don't have Illustrator but I'll ask my designer friend.

Does dots per inch for printing correspond to pixels per inch in the digital file? Doing the calculation I get 16535 / (28 x 39.4) = 15 pixels per inch on the billboard... No it's not meant to be seen up close (will be hung on the facade).

Can you think of any other option? What do you think of printing and scanning?
 
Sorry, yes, you're right - It is 15dpi when printed at 28m.
 
Melmoth71 said:
The designer says the image has to be blown up to 16535 pixels wide which he hasn't managed to do with the required quality.
Click to expand...
I'd (politely) suggest that they might want to re-think their quality requirements.

Forget the 16535 stuff for a moment. Your image has 3872 pixels which are to be spread across 28m. That's 138 pixels per metre, so each pixel will be about 7mm across on the finished print.

That sounds huge. We're more used to thinking of pixels per inch, not pixels per metre! But ... how far away do you have to be standing, to appreciate the image? The usual rule of thumb is the observation distance should be the same as the diagonal of the image, which in this case is about 30 metres. And if you view the image from 30 metres away, you certainly won't seen any pixellation if the pixels are only 7mm across!

But it might not be possible to view the image from 30m away. I'm thinking of the murals in the travelator tunnels at Heathrow, which are many tens of meters long but you can only see a portion at a time. In that case the pixel density needs to be commensurate with, say, viewing a 3 metre segment of the image from a range of 4 metres, and the fact that the whole image might be 20 times linger is irrelevant.

So if you view the image from 30 metres away, it will look great. If you view it from say 1 metre away, it will look rubbish (and you won't have any idea what the image actually is from that range). I guess it boils down to how the image is supposed to be perceived and how it is going to be displayed and where people will be standing to look at it. I have no idea about that, but maybe that's where the 16535 number comes in. 16535 is a little over 4 times the number of pixels you have, so perhaps the designers intend for people to see (a small portion of) the image from range of 5 to 10 metres?

If that's the case, then (a)you're stuffed, and (b) the whole project is stuffed. If they NEED 16535 pixels then they need 6200 pixels in the short dimension ad they need a 100 megapixel image to work with. Where are they going to get one of them from?

Hope this helps.
 
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Somebody speak with the printer, they've done this before. It sounds like no one else involved has. My guess is that the "volunteer designer" is probably guessing, and his resizing efforts are destroying the image as far as the printer is concerned.
 
I would go with Stewart's idea about contacting the printer to see exactly what the problem is. Messing around with an image in Photoshop and other software can induce artefacts that can screw up image quality. I'm not saying this has happened here but overs sharpening and poor image corrections can ruin a good image. OK it looks fine on a screen but when printed it's awful.

I remember a gadget show episode when they compared the quality of film v's digital. The final result was a large banner on the side of a building from each format. They used 35mm film, that was scanned and a DSLR. Now I don't remember the resolution of the digital camera but I don't think it was as high as yours. On the TV the results looked fine from both, and I suspect the banners were about the same size as yours
 
I have done this. I'll look to get a longer reply later, about to go to an appt. In short I ran a self promotion advert on a 48 sheet billboard (this isn't a plug but you can see it if you go to my blog).

Later

Matt
 
Just read everything properly and realise what you need is different to what I did! Sorry, my experience is different. A 28m x 10.5m banner is bloody enormous!
 
that's enormous... but isn't exactly going to be seen close up (right? RIGHT?)

Get the print house to do it if there's noone in the organisation who's experienced in this.

It's definitely pushing it.... but then, if they'd had an idea in the first place, they'd have realised that almost no amateur images would scale up properly to that size...


I came up with the idea of printing my photo with the best quality possible (maybe as a 12x4 inch print), then scanning the print with a high-res scanner to produce a much larger file. Would this be possible?? Would it produce a good enough image?
Click to expand...

No.
 
What Stewart said about distance. I had an image displayed on a huge digital advertising board taken with my 50D. Looked great when viewed at street level.
 
Hi all, sorry I haven't replied before. Thanks for your replies.

Luckily the printing company finally agreed that the image supplied by our graphic designer was of good enough quality so the printing is to go ahead... Big relief as this commission means a lot to me! :)

From people on other fora I understood where the resolution required by the company came from. Apparently the rule of thumb in the industry is that the file for a billboard has to be big enough to give good printing resolution for an image a quarter of the length of the billboard. 'Good printing resolution' is usually 300 ppi but for a b&w and/or fuzzy image it can be as low as 60 ppi. So assuming you want 60 ppi for an image 1/4 of 28 m, that gives us 60 x (1/4) x 28 x 39.4 = 16548 pixels!! Which is what they were asking for.

Somebody else gave me a more specific formula which is also used to calculate the ppi required (for the billboard) depending on viewing distance. If the viewing distance to the billboard is d (in inches), the ppi required is ppi = 2 / (d x 0.000291). If d is in metres, then ppi = 2 / (d x 39.4 x 0.000291). So in this case, because my file is big enough to give 15 ppi on a 28 m billboard, if you reverse the calculation the billboard would be of enough quality to be seen at a distance of 11.63 m or further, which should be enough because the billboard will be up on the facade to be seen from street level.

So mystery solved and thanks a million again for your replies, I'm one happy bunny that the project is to go ahead :)
 
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Thanks for following up, that's all good to know for future reference.
 
yours is a 10 meg pixel camera, and is it really capable of producing billboard posters of that size? I leave that up for consideration. What I would suggest is seriously thinking about a camera upgrade for one with a higher pixel count. The Nikon D610 with 24.3 megapixel or the D800 with 36.3 megapixel for example. Even the now humble D300 in Tiff mode pumps out 36 megapixel
 
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Looks like it is according to the company and the info I got, but I will consider an upgrade for the future :)
 
realspeed said:
yours is a 10 meg pixel camera, and is it really capable of producing billboard posters of that size? I leave that up for consideration. What I would suggest is seriously thinking about a camera upgrade for one with a higher pixel count. The Nikon D610 with 24.3 megapixel or the D800 with 36.3 megapixel for example
Click to expand...

But what would you do 6-7 years ago when at least in DSLR terms 10mp was cutting edge, even MFD started out at about 4-6mp if I remember correctly, it's not like a bill board is printed at 300dpi
 
Matthew
I started out in digital photography with a Kodak 2 megapixel camera (cx4200 model)
how things have changed since then. Now my D800 pumps out an amazing 108 megapixels in Tiff mode

jbf5.jpg


Taken with the Kodak 2 megapixel camera unedited (Warwick Castle) date year right- day month wrong. Exif data left for those interested
 
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itsdavedotnet said:
that's enormous....
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28m x 10.5m is pretty big but it's dwarfed by the one they used on the Sea Containers building for the Diamond Jubilee in 2012. That was blown up to 100m x 70m. It's a 1970's shot so was almost certainly taken on 35mm film.

I think I'd have tried to find out who the printers were because whoever did this knows his or her onions.

http://wodumedia.com/wp-content/upl...otograph-measuring-70-by-100-metres-shows.jpg

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/05/25/article-2149973-134AE7E9000005DC-512_964x610.jpg

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...nfurled-River-Thames-mark-Queens-Jubilee.html

Edit: Judging by the 7th shot down on the 3rd link the big picture looks more like 100m x 35m to me, not 100m x 70m.
 
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Melmoth71 said:
..... So assuming you want 60 ppi for an image 1/4 of 28 m, that gives us 60 x (1/4) x 28 x 39.4 = 16548 pixels!! Which is what they were asking for.
Click to expand...

What software are they using to get the file up to 16584 - Perfect Resize?
 
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