From: Denton Taylor <denton@xxxxxxxx>
At 10:17 AM 1/30/00 -0800, you wrote:
>I am planning to do limited edition fine art printing for myself and
>selected other artists, and would like to solicit for interesting
>high-resolution work you might have done.
The problem I ran into with this stuff (and I recently had a massive Noblex
panorama piece done at Duggal) is that there are plenty of people who want
the output work, but most of them can't handle the input. That is, you need
massive numbers of megaytes scans, and where do you go for those?
Most service bureaus can do drum scans. Prices vary a lot, but can be
as low as $25 per image. (If this goes to plan, I've got an Imacon
drum scanner budgeted for Q3.) 4x5 is excellent for monster prints,
but medium format contains a lot of information too.
For a fine-art quality 50" by 33" print, you need about 143 MB of
information. A 6x6 scanned at about 5000 spi will put you in the
ballpark with fine-grain film, and a 4x5 only needs to be scanned at
3,000 spi to get to that size.
Full-res 35mm pans work well for looooong prints. For example, a
typical portrait-format 360 pan scanned at 2700 spi makes a 300 dpi,
12" tall print that is 96" long! In my experience, a crop of 180
degrees or less is a good way to go, still leaving an impressive 48"
wide print. A PowerMac G4 will stitch a 12-frame, 3,600 by 28,000
pixel image in a couple hours, using QuickTime Virtual Reality
Authoring Studio.
I've also had success with tiling. I've recently done several tiled
pans using the Zuiko 24mm shift (obligatory OM content :-) shifting
the lens full up and full down for each slice. Unfortunately, QTVRAS
has a bug that keeps it from properly stitching images over 4,196
pixels tall.
For larger, non-fine-art work, the resolution is not so important.
Murals and such displays tend to be fairly low-resolution, because
they are not designed to be viewed up-close. And did you ever look at
a billboard up close? The half-tone dots are the size of marbles!
They print billboards at 5 to 50 dpi. So you need to consider typical
viewing distance when planning a large print.
Once you have the typical viewing distance, you can determine the
required optical resolution you need. These need to be "real" pixels,
but once you have them, you can use interpolation (or even better,
Genuine Fractals) to fake more information. Always sharpen a bit at
the large size, using Photoshop's "Print Size" and standing the
proper distance from the monitor to gauge the effect.
For fine art work, though, it generally needs to be seen up close, so
you do whatever it takes to get the "real" pixels. Since most pan
stitchers choke on such images, you have to do them by hand in an
ordinary image program. I've had good results using LivePicture 2.6
(Mac only). It is a non-resident editor, so you can edit images
bigger than the RAM you have, and it uses the image file almost like
virtual memory, paging in parts to work on, then paging them back out
to the image file. I've worked on a 500 MB image this way, with only
128 MB of RAM. I wouldn't call it "pleasant," but it was possible, at
least!
: Jan Steinman <mailto:Jan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
: Bytesmiths <http://www.bytesmiths.com>
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