super hi res illustration

[kraal]

i designed lots of billboards back in the day..... i never used 'actual resolution' because billboards are not hi-res.... they are made to be seen from a distance so i designed at the same scale and they enlarged to thier needs

rule of thumb is 10% of size at 300 dpi

[tfritzsche]

Hi 2byts,
I have worked in prepress for many years. The final resolution of your art work should depend on viewing distance, if the illustration is on a billboard some 60' from the viewer the resolution will be much lower, typically printed at 25 ppi. if the illustration is on a wall with close viewing distances the resolution will need to be higher, typically 125+ppi. Also depending on the nature of the illustration you may need more or less resolution, illustrations with fine detail will need higer resolution than illustrations with no fine detail. The convention has been to give the printer 1.5 -> 2x the linescreen(for halftone printing), with digital images/illustrations one can get away with 1.25x linescreen(LPI) or lower where no fine detail exsits.

With that said, if it is a billboard,being printed with a halftone dot, with a large viewing distance than krall's suggested 30dpi will be more than enough for you illustration.

hope this helps

thomas

[MasonDoran]

Thanx a lot guys. The closest viewing distance is going to be 3-4 meters. It is for a theater stage setup so the quality will be appreciated. I will not have any type or sharp edges, it will look somewhat painterly.

So with the 10% rule, I should work at 80x60 cm at 300dpi. I have not work with printers in a long time so i have forgotten all about LPI. I usually think in terms of pixel dimensions at 72dpi.

There will be some photo montages and paintovers involved, so how do you guys manage to work with such large file sizes? The slow down would kill my comp...and its 4x cores.

[berniebernie]

you should be prompted to use the pdd file format by photoshop - used to work with large files.

makes sure in your ps prefs the app takes a good 85% of your ram (i found it works best on my machine, but it's old - yours might be different)

you can check pixel doubling in the prefs as well, which might speed things up a little

if your ram is limited (or your file really huge) make sure your scratch disk is efficient and not doing anything else (playing music, d/l's) while PS is dumping it's memory in it

[MasonDoran]

its working great. The printer also told me to work at 80x60cm at 400 dpi.


I have been able to use several layers, blend modes, filters, and copy paste between duplicate files without a hitch. The only time consuming part was saving files.

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