[Sanga]

A friend of mine has asked me if I could create a poster for her band, I would love to do this, but I have never done anything for print before, and was hopeing that some of you might be able to point me in the right direction, like image size, rez, and what kind of company would handle a job like this. my friend wants a 20 X 40 poster and about 200 copies.

TIA,
Sanga

[Ko]

Hi Sanga

Making good looking posters digitally from scratch can be a real pain!
Try to make a new image in Photoshop.
make it 20x40" and minimum of 200 dpi.
Now you have an image resolution of 4000x8000! and a size of nearly 100MB!
If your machine can handle this... start painting... and be patient.
On top this the optimal dpi should be 300.
But less can work alright for posters.
The smaller you make your image the more
the quality will suffer. So you might want to
make a border around the main image or some
space on the upper/lower part of the poster
for text/information.

As for the actual production.
Try to find a small print-shop preferably with a poster printer/plotter so that the image can be output directly from the digital source. Most print-shops can handle
jobs from both Macs and PC's.

Using offset-printing is only affordable when
dealing with more than 1000 copies.

Hope this helps...

Ko

[Affected]

It might help to plot the image out at a smaller res., resize it to the size you want, chop it up into pieces and do the detailing in smaller parts.

------------------
Affected

Knowledge is belief and belief is knowledge
http://affected.xs.mw

[faustgfx]

i have to say this.

try to avoid using too many layers and channels and so forth. things get funky when the actual file size (kb's) gets too big to handle.

worst case scenario (that naturally happened to me..) is where your .psd file becomes so big, win98/ps5.0 can't even open it anymore because it chokes on the swap files. and of course i had a second deadline (having crossed the first a few weeks earlier...) pressing on, so what could one do? quit whining, stick the .psd on a zip disks, throw win98 away, install linux/x/gimp, go there, resize and edit the final touches, save, throw linux away, put win98 back.. done.

this was on a p2 300mhz / 128 ram. it wasn't pleasant. :|

[Sanga]

Thanks guys, this is the kind of info I was looking for. I think my computer can handle the large file size, (600 mhz PIII with 256 megs of ram.) I guess I'll give this job a shot and see what happens!

Sanga

[Ko]

...Just remember to post your image, when done!

Ko