Creating a Higher Resolution Life Poster 4

Posted by Jason Yanowitz Sat, 25 Nov 2006 01:45:00 GMT

Last year, after reading Life Poster, I tried making my own. I wanted to change it in a few ways:

  1. Higher resolution print
  2. More poster dimensions flexibility than iPhoto gives you
  3. Less expensive
  4. Different photo sizes (not just a grid of photos) in the poster.

I ended up with a 22×32 inch poster. The picture size is 20×30, with a 1 inch border all the way around. This has the advantage that it looks great even without matting. I just have it dry mounted to foam core and a simple frame put on it.

I found a place (Perfect Posters) that is about half the price of Apple’s Kodak fullfillment, and it’s 300 DPI (instead of 200 DPI). Standard disclaimer: I have no connection to Perfect Posters other than finding their service great.

Here’s what I did. I used iPhoto v6.2 and Photoshop CS 2. I also looked at Posterino but found I didn’t like its interface.

  1. Choose your dimensions (I went with 20×30), how many photos you want across and down (I went with 8 and 16), which means I can have up to 128 photo “slots” and the photos should be cropped to a 4×3 ratio. (20 inches across / 8 = 2.5 inches across. 30 inches down / 16 = 1.875. 2.5 / 1.875 = 4×3.)
  2. Choose your photos. I create a new album in iPhoto cleverly named “My Poster.” In this case, I need about 128 photos. I actually picked a little less than that, because some of them I am going to make bigger than 1 slot (more on that below). I recommend trying to use photos with a mix of colors (and as many from nicely lit places as possible).
  3. Lay them out. Once I’ve picked all my photos, I make the iPhoto window as big as possible and then set the thumbnails to a size that allows me to see them 8 across [you can use the slider on the lower right of the window].
    • Making a photo extra large. In order to break up the grid and to highlight photos I really like, I make some of them larger. In the above poster, I have 2 photos which take up 4 “slots” in the poster. To aid layout, I make 3 duplicates of the photo and then place them in 4 spaces I want the photo to use. Later, in Photoshop, I’ll make it one larger photo.
    • Including portrait (3×4) photos. I use a similar approach for photos that are longer in the vertical direction. I use two slots for these and crop the photos to 4×6. I duplicate the photo once so that I can place it in the two slots it will use.
    • Going crazy Broadway style. You could have a photo take up a 3×3 grid, or crop a photo 8×3 and have it take up two slots side-by-side (I did that in the upper right with a picture of Amira trying to stand).
  4. Export them. Once you’ve picked all your photos and laid them out, you have to export them from iPhoto. Select all the photos in the album (Command-A). Go to File->Export. Click on the “File Export” tab in the dialog box. Select Format: Original, Full Size Images, and Use Album Name. Click Export. Then create a new folder and the images should all get saved into them. In my case, I had 128 images, named “my poster – 001.jpg” through “my poster – 128.jpg” If you don’t end up with as many images as you were expecting, you probably only had a subset of the photos in your album selected when you went to do the export.
  5. Import them in Photoshop (I used CS 2). Select File->Automate->Contact Sheet II. In the dialog box, select the folder you saved all the photos in, choose 20×30 for the image size, 300 DPI, RGB, Flatten Layers, Place Across First, Columns 8, Rows 16, Use Auto-Spacing. After you hit OK, Photoshop will begin doing its magic. Several minutes later, you will have a contact sheet.
  6. Resize your canvas. Image->Canvas Size Width: 22, Height: 32. This will give you a one inch border all the way around. Save your project (File->Save)
  7. Adjust for your larger photos. This part takes the longest. If you have a photo you want to take up 4 slots, open it up (you can use some simple math to figure out which of your 128 files it was) in Photoshop. Then select Image->Image Size and enter the new width and height. In this case, if I want it to use 2×2 slots (4 total), and a slot is 750 pixels across (20/8*300), then I want this photo to be 1500 pixels across. After the resize, do Select->All (Command-A) and Edit->Copy (Command-C)
    8. . Now in your life poster, zoom way in. You are going to want to select the full area that you want to paste this poster into. There’s probably a better way to do this, but I just zoom in super far and draw a box around the four photos I had laid out as a marker for the one big version that I want to insert. Once I’ve selected the area (and you want this to be pixel-perfect so everything lines up), you do Edit->Paste Into and zoom back out to make sure it looks good. I am inept, so it takes me several tried to get the area selected properly. I am guessing there’s a way to just paste into a specific area of a poster, which would be a lot better, but I am a Photoshope neophyte.
  8. Save as a jpg. File->Save As->[select jpg] On the next screen, I use a quality of “10” which produces about a 16 megabyte file.
  9. Upload and print. If you use Perfect Posters, make sure you select “cut to exact size” during the checkout process if you are using my approach of a one-inch white border.