Creating Big Prints Using A:M.... Resolution Ideas?

[Laconic]

Hi!

 

I would like to turn my A:M renders into photographic prints. I'm excited that A:M can render at any resolution (go patches!) so does anyone have any ideas as to what pixel size I should render to approximate a really good 35mm camera negative? I'd like to then take this "negative" and print it out at a photo shop. I'm thinking of prints that would be in the range of FEET as opposed to INCHES, so a 3ft by 5ft picture that you would hang on a gallery wall. Some of the size would have to come from a smaller negative being "blown up."

 

I know that there is a "super 35mm" preset on the camera output options, but would this be good enough to blow up to big format prints?

 

Any ideas would be appreciated.

 

T

[largento]

Most places use 4K as a standard. Obviously the higher the resolution, the better, but I'm not sure how far you can go down on the low end of resolution before getting a "soft" image.

[heyvern]

A 35mm print and a digital image are apples and oranges. They have nothing in common really. A 35mm film image is made up of grains of color from a chemical process. A digital image is made from individual pixels. They aren't comparable. A badly shot 35mm film image, shot on slow film with a cheap camera is going to look like crap next to a digital photo shot on a 3 megapixel high quality camera with high quality lenses, shot in focus on a tripod.

 

You can't really compare film to digital. It's going to depend on the print output device, the type of image. For instance a very dark image with a small dynamic range might not print as well on one type of printer. An image with a balanced range of darks and lights would get a different result.

 

Yes, 35mm default render set up in AM should make a good print at 5' x 3'. Keep in mind it depends on the print device. You could use a cheap crappy printer and it looks bad, or you could print on a very expensive high resolution ink jet on archival acid free museum quality paper in 6 colors. They have ink jets with 6 colors, usually they have an extra "red" ink and an extra "blue" ink to match the quality and vibrancy of film prints. Adding those extra colors gets closer to the color gamut of film prints.

 

At the size you want to print the resolution is not as important as you might think. You could actually render smaller and scale up without loss of quality. No one will look at a print that size from 6 inches away to see if there are dots or pixelation. At that size you would be standing far enough back that no one could tell if it was a digital image or a print from a 35mm film camera printed on photographic paper. You want the best quality print, spend the effort on the print PROCESS. Don't worry as much about the resolution. You could skimp on resolution and still get a better print than having more resolution with a crap printing process (don't skimp too much though. )

 

Years ago when working in digital 4 and 6 color printing I had to produce an extremely high resolution image for a brand new high end offset press. It used 6 colors at 600lpi. NOT DPI... LPI, lines per inch. That was HUGE at the time and required much higher resolution for the images being printed. The final image required by the "usual" standards would have been more than 1gb. This was like probably more than 10 years ago. There was no way to transport a 1gb image back then... there were no DVDs, no huge hard drives.

 

I dropped the image size or resolution by 50%. No one noticed a bit of difference. Image was sharp and clear. This was a 6 color offset print process that used an extra "red" and "cyan" inks to create richer colors that had a much larger color gamut than traditional 4 color offset printing.

 

EDIT: We use to output digitally created images to 4 x 5 film. At the time many places couldn't handle the huge digital files so this was one way to go. You could I suppose out put your digital image directly to film then use that to get your prints... you see what I mean about comparing apples to oranges. What's the difference really between a high res digital image and a photograph shot on 35mm film?

 

-vern

[Fuchur]

The difference is, that a film is more or less resolution-independend (till the grain, etc. take effect) while a digital image has one resolution and that is it.

In that aspect, a film is the better medium than a digital image is.

 

But of course there are many other advantages of a digital image and so it is not at all worse.

 

If you wont to be really save, you can go to photoshop, create a 3/5-feet (about 1,0-1,5m, if I am not wrong) at a 150 dpi (you wont need more for that big image... even less may be okay there...) image.

Now have a look at the resolution (it is about 9000px x 9000px). That would be the really save. I however think you can very likley go 2/3 or even 1/2 of the resolution without loosing anything for your viewer.

 

So render out at 6000px x 6000px [36 MP] (or even 4500 px x 4500 px [20MP]) and you should have a real nice result... some would even say you could go smaller than that, but if time isn't a factor I wouldnt try that... there is no need to not waste a little bit time to be save. But dont forget to use high-resolution-textures too... otherwise the geometry will be very sharp, but the textures will look quite blurred or grainy.

 

See you

*Fuchur*

[photoman]

I've read that a 35mm slide film is rated at 25 megapixels* So if you like long renders I would render at say 4000x6000 for a 24megapixel picture.

 

Photoman

 

*Megapixel = image HeigntxWidth

[John Bigboote]

I usually work backwards, starting in Photoshop. I'll say... Gee- I want a 3D image that is 4 feet by 5 feet at a medium to high resolution, say 150 dots-per-inch. Next, I'll make a new document at those dimensions (Cntrl- N set ,to inches enter values, multiply 'how many' feet by 12 inches) NOW---I have my empty blank canvas-but how big is it in pixels? Easy, I'll take a look at the image size--- and learn that I need my Hash image to be 7200 pixels by 9000 pixels... Next- in A:M, set my camera/render dimensions to that size and set about making my imagery.

 

One foot at 150 DPI (dots per inch) equals 1800 pixels.

[Bendytoons]

Everyones advice is good, but if you want to do a gallery show I would recommend a higher resolution than others are suggesting. A couple of years ago I mounted a show of panoramas between four and eight feet long. I found that with archival quality prints (I used an epson 2400) I wanted to print at 600 dpi to get the best image quality. This does make the images harder to work with in Photoshop and requires a lot more render time, but you can't go wrong with higher quality.

[Gerry]

The rule of thumb I always consider when planning resolution vs. file size is that dots (or pixels) become indistinguishable to the naked eye at 144 dpi/ppi (or so I've heard). So that's the bare minimum; above that it's a question of judgement and how much subtlety or richness an image needs.

[Laconic]

Excellent suggestions! Thank you all for your input. This will set me in the right direction!

 

 

Regards!

 

Tim