Editing for print/posters (please advise if you can)

[pihjin]

March 28, 2008 at 12:28 pm

Hi everyone!

I really hope you can all help me even a little!

I recently did a photo shoot in very low light so I had to bump my ISO up to 1600 when shooting. I have a Canon 400D.
I was shooting on the largest JPEG size for all of them but only JPEG and RAW for a small handful. This was because I had to take a lot of shots and wouldn’t have had time to empty my cards to my portable hard drive (even with one card in and one downloading, the one card in would have filled up too fast and I would have missed something. Which I couldn’t really afford to do).
I still managed to get some great shots which I’m happy with but now I have to edit them. I have two question areas:

1. Is noise ninja the best program to run my photos through to get rid of some of the grain? Does anyone one know of a good tutorial for Noise Ninja? I’ve never used it before.

2. Some of the photos will be used for promotional material such as posters etc. What’s the best file size I should be editing to for this? If I bump up the resolution to 300 for print what is realistically the largest size they can be printed out at? Is there any way at all to get them to be printed bigger (any software I can use to do this?).

Basically I need to make these the best, clearest, biggest pictures I can now from what I have. I did my best on the day.

Many thanks in advance to you all as this is really important to me. I’m sorry I can’t show you a sample image but I was taking them for a short film and I can’t release any until the film’s aired.

Thanks again,
Pihjin.

[Expresbro]

March 28, 2008 at 12:55 pm

I think Steve, stcst, might be the best man to help with this as he does thiS kind of thing for a living. If you PM him I’m sure he wont mind.

Me, I know nothing about this kind of stuff but I can well imagine there’s more than a little pressure to produce the goods now.

Good luck with it anyway.

Robbie

8)

[pihjin]

March 28, 2008 at 1:02 pm

Thanks for the suggestion Robbie.

I’m PM-ed him just now. I hope he doesn’t mind!

: )

[Expresbro]

March 28, 2008 at 1:37 pm

Nah..Steve’s sound..as long as you don’t interrupt his lunch…heheh!!

[Thorsten]

March 28, 2008 at 3:07 pm

If you’re producing posters you certainly wont need 300dpi. I think 120dpi ought to be more than adequate, but it all depends on how big you’re planning on printing.

I use Imagenomic Noiseware Professional if I have to deal with noise issues. I used to use Neat Image for a long time but was very impressed with Noiseware when I discovered it. Much better than Neat Image or Noise Ninja.

For resizing, I use FixerLabs SizeFixer XL – the best resizing application, bar non, IMHO.

You should also have a read of the Digital Blowups article over at the Canon Professional Network site – it details how one photographer produced larger than life posters from Canon 10D JPEG images!

[pihjin]

March 28, 2008 at 4:07 pm

Thanks a million Thorsten…
I’ll check out those programs now and have a read of the article!

The sample gallery on the Noiseware software look pretty impressive I’ll give it that!

[RGH_Photography]

March 28, 2008 at 7:04 pm

Read this it may help ? http://www.13dots.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15401

[stcstc]

March 28, 2008 at 7:45 pm

Like i said, the res you need is mainly based on the type of printing and size used for printing the posters

for example, billboard posters are very very low res, like 50 or 72 dpi

But those posters in bus shelters are actually quite hi res and also people are viewing them from a very close distance

[pihjin]

March 30, 2008 at 6:09 pm

Thanks a million RGH… I’ll give that a read now and hopefully that’ll help me!

The pictures might be used on some promotional posters (for a couple of things) but I’m not sure at what size.

Thanks again everyone… It’s helped me a lot.