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Upsizing photos


Scudamore
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I'll give you a little background...

 

I work at a signmakers. We print and apply digital wallpaper amongst other things.

 

Example below. See the books? Yeah...they're not books. How very clever i hear you cry.

 

053.jpg

 

Well anyway i'm looking to get an image of Habitat 67 which i've sourced onto said wall at a size of 2.2m x 2.7m. But my image size is 1024 x 681px 72dpi. Is this gonna be possible do you think?

 

Oh and as an aside i also offered my services to the marketing department of Southampton FC as i thought it would be nice to have a wall with a photo of the FA Cup winning team in the boardroom to perhaps draw a line under the whole train debacle. Apparently they are too busy to reply to such things though...

Edited by Scudamore
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First up, can you get a large image of the Habitat 67 (Im not going to bull**** you, I aint got a clue what that is...)? 72dpi, as you know, is pretty low. 240 would be best for a huge upsize.

 

This is Habitat 67...an ugly beautiful piece of architecture in Montreal

 

BE048588.jpg?size=67&uid={8930e77e-b8f6-40ef-af1e-8b44fec0a905}

 

I could get a higher resolution image...but that would require me putting my hand in my pocket...

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Apologies if any of the following sounds like I'm teaching you to suck eggs, but obviously I don't know your level of knowledge.

 

Now, judging by that photo of the wall above, I would guesstimate that people will be viewing it from a minimum of 5 feet away At 5 feet viewing distance the human eye can resolve about 0.72mm line pairs; ie 0.028 inch; ie 35 per inch; ie about 70 dpi, so anything less than that, and the eye will notice it. That's the theory at least.

 

72 dpi means nothing without the size. 1024 x 681 pixels, at 72dpi would give you an image of 14.3 x 9.5 inches. The wall you want to cover is approx 86 x 106 inches, so you'd need to upscale the existing photo quite a bit to get there, and that's at only 72dpi... I would personally go to at least 100dpi, probably more. Also, don't forget also that the picture you have already is the wrong aspect ratio... you'd need to crop it to 839 x 681 to be correct, so you're losing more of the picture already.

 

As Pancake says, you ideally need the largest file you can get hold of to give you the best possible starting point, and then the best thing to do is simply try upsizing it to 86x106 inches, at about 120dpi, in whatever packages you have available to you... Photoshop does a good job if you have nothing else to start with... and then print out some 100% samples to view. If this is a commercial job then pay for a hi-res image and build the cost into your quote.

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