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4' x 8' banner 'resolution'?


xnyjyh

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hi there, just curious as im making a banner to be printed on vinyl for advertising. i havnt made anything in this scale before...

my dimensions are 4' by 8' and dont know what resolution ton use so its not pixelated and nice and smooth.

please let me know whats best.


Thanks
 
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It all depends on the printers DPI. Have you not asked the printing company that you are going to use what they would prefer, as we don't know what machinery they are using. As the pdf of resolution info given below states-
Excess resolution is not used when printing the file and only does three things:
• make your files larger than necessary,

• increase the printing time, and

• it may have the effect of “softening” your images.



Click Here so you can be totally clear on the meaning of term resolution.
 

Tom Mann

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a) If the material you are printing does not contain any photographic images, and only has text, lines & other geometric shapes, fill colors & gradients, etc. then don't design it in Photoshop. Instead, use Adobe Illustrator (or some equivalent vector based program). You then can ship the *.ai file to your printer and don't have to concern yourself about the final ppi, or even more mysterious quantities such as line screen (if using an offset / half-tone printing method). In addition, your file will be vastly smaller, and, if the printer knows what he is doing, you should get stunningly sharp results.

b) In contrast, if you are printing one giant photographic image, then you need to work on it in PS (or equivalent), and you will have to concern yourself with the ppi.

Fortunately, you rarely will need ppi values as large as the recommended values for more conventional size prints (ie, 200 to 300 ppi). This is because people will rarely approach a large poster as closely as they might approach a smaller print. First, viewers tend to stay further away because they want to take in the entire poster / banner at one time, not minutely examine tiny areas. Second, it's often physically impossible for viewers to approach too closely. For example, the poster / banner may be mounted on the wall several feet in back of a conference reception table, it may be mounted in a window or on the far side of a stairwell, or it may even be a billboard set well back from the road.

So, if you would normally use 300 ppi for a print with a long dimension of 1 foot (ie, typically viewed from about 2 foot away), then if you know that no one is ever going to approach closer than 20 feet, in principle you could go all the way down to 30 ppi. If it's going to be printed as a billboard and no one will ever get within 200 feet of it, even 3 ppi will be fine.

In reality, printers know that there will always be a few people who will be able to view a large poster up close -- the designer, the people that mount it, etc. So, they typically recommend a minimum of around 100 ppi so these folks don't freak out when they are a foot or two away, working on it. For the same reason, billboard printers usually bottom out around 20 ppi.

Here are links to some web pages that also discuss this issue:

http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t245555-what-resolution-for-poster-size-prints.html

http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/f...34-big-poster-resolution-150-dpi-is-it-enough (scroll down to the next-to-the-last message)

http://www.imagers.com/posters/postersetup.html

BTW, note that all of the above links fail to distinguish between ppi and dpi. Unfortunately, this is a very common mistake, so wherever they say "dpi" mentally replace it with "ppi". If you are uncertain about the difference between the two, the last few pages of the very nice paper that Spruce cited clarifies the difference. Basically, inkjet printers have to lay down many dots to make one pixel, so dpi values for typical inkjets can easily be 1000 dpi or higher. This is typically set by the "quality factor" adjustment in the printer driver, whereas the ppi is set in your PS file.

BTW, posters and banners often consist of both vector based and pixel based components, e.g., a couple of photos with surrounding text, color gradients, shapes, etc. In this case, work on the pixel based material in PS, and then merge it with the vector based material in AI and then output everything to an ai, eps or pdf to send to the printer. This approach will produce much smaller files than rasterizing everything to a suitable ppi value.

One final comment: If you want the absolutely simplest possible rule of thumb, if you send the printer a file that is at least 4000 pixels in the long dimension, you will rarely have problems. Even if the printer has to up-rez that to print your poster, their RIP engines are quite good, and they are used to performing this service for many, many clients.


HTH,

Tom
 
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Tom Mann

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