Getting Professional Printing

[Zoom]

There are many ways of getting one's fractallography printed professionally, and I suppose soon enough someone will make a topic asking what methods people use, so I thought I'd post my response first to save time.

If you have a deviantART ( http://www.deviantart.com ) account, for a small fee you can upgrade to a prints account. Then you could make money on your artwork submitted as prints.

The only limitation is that one's image must be sized to print. When rendered or modified, the DPI (dots per inch) setting must be calculated to allow a) a high level of detail, and b) the size of the work to fit the dimensions accepted by deviantART. (They accept many different sizes and aspect ratios. You can see their list here: http://help.deviantart.com/337/ )

When I upgrade to a print account (in near future), my submitted renders will be 2400x2400 PNGs with a DPI of 300. This should make an 8"x8" print.

When submitting prints to deviantART one should also decide beforehand how much to charge per print, so as not to price oneself out of the market by being too cheap or expensive.

As this is just one option, I welcome others to share their professional printing methods here.

[matera]

I am lucky to have a friend with a gallery and frame shop and a big printer. She is enthusiastic about the idea of selling some of my fractals. My main problem is getting large enough images. Using Fractal Explorer's batch processing mode, I can go grocery shopping and come home to find either a 3600 to 4800 pixel wide image, or 50MB of corrupt mess, depending on the mood of my computer. No use trying for anything bigger, with what I have. I am aiming for a one to two foot size range in prints, for wall decor. At 300dpi, that's a lot of pixels

It is possible to enlarge them to a certain extent. I use IrfanView for that, because it works best with available computer resources. I must be patient, but it never gives me out-of-memory type errors, and always comes through.

So far I have found that making a very small enlargement - only about 50 pixels - using the B-spline resampling filter first, and then cranking it up all the way with the Lanczos filter, gives the best quality enlargement. The first incremental change serves to anti-alias all the hard edges. (Yes, I could do that when generating the image, but it would take three times as long, and the result would be no more certain. I might wait seven or eight hours for another failure rather than two or three.) IrfanView sets the DPI too. I save them in TIF format (best for my friend's Mac) and burn them onto a CD.

The enlarged images are not sharp at full size in the monitor, but when reduced to printed size they should appear as clear as the original unless viewed with a magnifying glass.

We're still in an experimental stage, nothing has been printed yet.

[Unhooked]

 I have found that the DeviantART print account is a great way to get printing done. I have to add though that it requires a bit of trial and error. I order small prints of my artwork to check out the quality and found that some of my images were printing too dark and needed to be lightened and resubmitted. I have to also consider whether it's worth rendering at say for example 3000 x 6000 at 400 dpi for printing. I've had renderings take up to 106 hours for the purposes creating a print file. Has anyone used Kinko's? I talked to a rep at Kinkos and he told me that my file sizes would lock up his system. Of course they require files to be in Photoshop formats which may make a hell of a difference.

[Nahee_Enterprises]

Living in a major metropolitan area, I am lucky enough to have my choice of various professional printing services (some within walking distance of where I reside).  And this gives me the option to work directly with the person that will be doing the printing of images I supply.  We can work out any problems very quickly and I can do "test prints" right then and there to check for possible color and/or brightness problems.

I normally go for various poster sizes, starting at a typical size of 24-inches by 18-inches at 300-DPI, and then increasing in size from there.  They are produced with a high-end commercial ink jet printer, using oil based, UV resistant inks, on heavy, high quality paper.  And something in this size and format costs me around $35 to $45 US dollars.

Having so many choices locally keeps prices at a fairly competitive rate, but it is always wise to shop around for the best quality and price.

[matera]

w00t I saw my first big prints today. Just have to celebrate. w00t

drat, no beer.

Edited to add...
Sold one. Maybe I'll get that beer some day.

[ansr23]

i've had about a dozen or so posters printed..

usually i render around 4800 x 3200 pixels from fractal explorer (ends up well over 50mb)
and have them printed on 24" x 18" at 300 dpi

this usually costs me around $30 cdn

this is by far the best way to view fractal art in my opinion..

the best results i've had for printing, is render several fractals with slightyly different filters, colours and parameters.
then layer in photoshop to give a more detailed effect

[David Makin]

Some of you may have noticed that I offer "ordinary" unlimited edition prints as well as limited edition ones.
The unlimited edition are inkjet or colour laser (which has improved vastly recently).
The limited edition are a choice of either Giclee on canvas or Durst Lambda prints.

At one point I started rendering all my work at 8000*6000 with an eye to having them done at 20"*15" at 400 dpi (the 'correct' dpi for Durst Lambda).

So far the largest I've actually had printed is an inkjet at 40" by 30" which used a source 12000*9000 i.e. 300 dpi.
I also had to render "Starfruit" at 12000*9000 for the ICM 2006 exhibition.
The longest render time was two solid months for "Aquamarine" for which I rather overdid the UF oversampling option :-)

I'm still investigating printing possibilities, though I don't think I'll be using any online ones, I'm far to picky about colour matching - if I could afford it I'd be using the professional matching method with colorimeter hardware etc.

[lycium]

i really wish i had access to good printing services, most of my fullsize images are 13k by 8k and upwards and my walls are bare

[Nahee_Enterprises]

Aaron H. "ansr23" or "joey jojo jr shabadu" wrote from Toronto:
>
>    i've had about a dozen or so posters printed..
>    usually i render around 4800 x 3200 pixels... (ends up well over 50mb)
>    and have them printed on 24" x 18" at 300 dpi
>

Actually, you would need to generate an image at 7200 x 5400 to get a 300 DPI final image of 24" x 18".

Based upon the resolution size you list above, along with the 300 DPI, the final image would only be 16" x 10.66" in size.  But if you used a 4800 x 3200 pixel image for printing a 24" x 18" poster, more than likely it was printed at 200 DPI.

[ansr23]

Actually, you would need to generate an image at 7200 x 5400 to get a 300 DPI final image of 24" x 18".

Based upon the resolution size you list above, along with the 300 DPI, the final image would only be 16" x 10.66" in size.  But if you used a 4800 x 3200 pixel image for printing a 24" x 18" poster, more than likely it was printed at 200 DPI.

i usually expand my images to the desired size in photoshop, then apply filters, work on the colours and whatnot. I don't usually have the final print size in mind when rendering the image. I find that 4800 x 3600 is definitely high enough detail for that size. Usually, i don't really know how good they're going to look untill they're finished rendering, and end up geting rid of most of them.

[Nahee_Enterprises]

Aaron H. "ansr23" or "joey jojo jr shabadu" wrote from Toronto:
>
>    i usually expand my images to the desired size in photoshop,
>    then apply filters, work on the colours and whatnot.  I don't
>    usually have the final print size in mind when rendering the image.

The problem with that is, your original rendering only has so many pixels.  By expanding the image, it becomes distorted, as in "blocky".  The larger the expansion from the original the more the distortion, causing visible "blockiness" in the image.  This is what happens with raster/bitmap images.  Only vector images may be expanded without causing distortions in the original.

It is usually always best to render much larger than what you intend on printing at (most people say no less that twice the final version).  You can always reduce and image by resizing/resampling, but increasing is another matter.

[ansr23]

i find the quality good for what i'm doing on a poster that size
300dpi is extremely detailed

the reason i generally don't go any larger is because i work with multiple layers so
any larger file size and i'll crash my current machine. there's also the rendering time

I also favour more fractal "textures" than harder edge looking stuff, so any 'blockiness'
is not really visible, and photoshop seems to do a pretty good job expanding images, especially
when using some filters after expanding.

thanks for your advice, i'll definitely consider final print size when rendering my next one.
are there any file size limits for software like fractal explorer or ultrafractal?

[bh]

How do "dots per inch" translate into "pixels per inch"? I think a dot in CMYK is either plain white, cyan, magenta, yellow or black; whereas a pixel can have many more values. So is it really useful to go on a 1:1 basis?

[lycium]

How do "dots per inch" translate into "pixels per inch"? I think a dot in CMYK is either plain white, cyan, magenta, yellow or black; whereas a pixel can have many more values. So is it really useful to go on a 1:1 basis?

that's why on a screen we can get away with 72dpi, whereas in print you want 300-600 and sometimes even more for photographic quality.

[Nahee_Enterprises]

Bernard Helmstetter wrote:
>
>    How do "dots per inch" translate into "pixels per inch"?
>    I think a dot in CMYK is either plain white, cyan, magenta,
>    yellow or black; whereas a pixel can have many more values.
>    So is it really useful to go on a 1:1 basis?

Rarely does DPI ever translate into PPI (unless one is scanning, or digitally photographing, a printed image).  And then it does not mean much anyway.

In most cases, the digital image size, represented by the number of pixels (width x height), determines the size of the output, based upon what DPI will be used.  For example, if the original rendering was 1600 x 1200, then printing at different DPI values would produce the following:

    DPI         Printed Image
-------------------------------------------
   100           16"  x 12"
   200            8"   x   6"
   300          5.3"  x   4"
   400            4"   x   3"
   600          2.6"  x   2"