Tips on Taking Great PhotoPosters!

So you’re ready to take that perfect photo to make that just right poster for hanging in your den, office or living room ect. First we start with the source of capturing the image, then using the right photo editing software to work out any misfits to the image, then it’s on to sending the file to us to do the printing. Here’s our take on it.

Digital cameras: Megapixels: The more the better.  However, the difference in price between 5 Megapixels and 6 Megapixels is substantial.  If you earn your living with a camera, than 6 is a good choice.  Otherwise, you might want to live with 3 to 5.

If you don't plan to make very many large (40” x 72”) prints, you can do very well with a 2 or better yet 3 Megapixel camera.  Viewed on the screen, or on smaller poster prints, these cameras are very adequte. What we've found is that nearly all digital cameras, with well-illuminated subjects, without any subsequent editing, produce color, which looks good.  The same color might or might not look good on your monitor, but it will probably look good on a poster print.

Digital zoom: A mostly useless feature.  You can crop your photos in a photo editor.  The digital zoom is not doing anything other than cropping your photo, at the expense of overall detail.

Optical zoom: Very useful.  However, if you have and plan to use anything better than 3x optical zoom, you should either bring your tripod with you or shoot with very good lighting and fast shutter speeds.

Another thing to keep in mind when taking the shot is to zoom in on the main subject of the photo. When this is cropped it shows the subject big on the poster.

Editing software: Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro is some good ones to try, and there are free program on the Internet that do a very good job and easy to use. The name of the game to this is easy! Using the software to zoom in and cropping the image to the lay out of your photo poster.

Adding Text: If your doing a poster advertising print you would :  For the sake of illustration, let's say you want to add some text to a 5 Megapixel photo, and print it at 20" x 30".  For the text to be sharp, you should make your file at 6,000 x 9,000 pixels (54 Megapixels).  On the other hand if it’s a photo shot of your kid playing ball and you wanted to add “Player of the Year” across the bottom or top, you could send us the 5 Megapixel photo and a very small number of bytes of text and formatting information.  We'll blow the image up to 300 PPI before we add the text. 

Saving and Sending the file: A "good" JPG compression, in Photoshop, means than when you click "save as" and select JPG compression, you will choose a number in the range of 10 to 12.  This will give you file compression probably in the range of 10:1 or 20:1, and the quality will be excellent.  (When the program asks you for compression type, choose "baseline.")  (Nearly all digital cameras use the same type of JPG compression, giving around 10:1 compression, and no visible loss of quality.)  If you use lower compression numbers, the result will be JPEG artifacts, which appear as halos or waves around objects.  The author has never seen a JPEG artifact in a properly compressed file.

There are other compression algorithms, e.g. BMP or GIF.  On the whole, they do not achieve the quality vs compression advantage that JPG provides.  (An exception is cartoons or posters, which do not contain more than 256 colors.  For those, GIF is an excellent choice.)

If you plan to do additional editing, later, on your file, it is best to save it in two formats -- the Photoshop format and the JPG format.  You can send the JPG format to us for printing, but if you do additional editing or revising that is best done starting with the Photoshop PSD file.

Bottom line…use a good 2 –3 or better mega pixel camera, zoom in on image subject, save image file and send to us for printing.

If you are a professional photographer or maybe just a photo taking lover, you can use our service to do your large prints. Professionals who work the weddings, graduations, portraits, etc. can add a large print to their services to add to the photo package. The photo-taking lover could cover the local sporting events and get in on the team photo day. This is real great with the little league teams. Car shows are also great. There’s a gentleman who works the golf clubs getting golfers in action and does a very large business. If you’re in the advertising field you can add some good ideals to your business offering poster size photo prints. Really just about any photo blow-up looks super! For more information about using ePhotoPoster as your business partner, contact us.