100 PPI BANNER DESIGN

[swil23]

Hey Guys,

I have to design a 96x52 inch banner for a trade show and i am working ini photoshop cs2. I need to know what dpi i should use? I will submit my artwork online to smart exhibits.com and they said to save my image as a TIFF, CMYK, 100 ppi and image at 100%. Is this the correct way to save and send my banner for printing? If this is the correct way, how do i find images to place on my banner that are 1200 ppi? If i downloaded an image at 300 dpi and transfered it to my banner document i would have to scale it to the size that i want and it won't come out looking pretty. Can someone please help me?

swil23

[Anogar]

It's probably a special printing process that uses 100 PPI. Now PPI and DPI are not actually the same thing, but they're often used interchangeably. For your purposes, just make your file 100 PPI in Photoshop and call it a day, it should work just fine.

[Oli-G]

Yeah, youll find that you can get away with even less detail on images of that size. Look at some advertising posters at bus stops, for example.

Like Anogar said... throw everything into your 100PPi PS file that's to scale, and shrink hi-res stuff to suit.

Also, you'll have to define pretty... By nature, shrinking an image hides the 'nasties' and can actually aid in 'prettying' something up depending on the purpose.

For example...a photo of me after a large night out is best viewed at a small scale :P

[Anogar]

For example...a photo of me after a large night out is best viewed at a small scale :P

:lol: That's what thumbnails are for.

[dr_vroeg]

and myspace

[DDD]

Also you need to consider how close the image will be viewed at. I am assuming from the dimension that is almost like a billboard type of deal or poster board. I would say 150 DPI. And as far as images for use, I think Genuine Fractals or Photozoom (formerly S-Spline) will be your best friend on this.

[Anogar]

Good advice DDD, but if the company is requesting 100 DPI, you might get a cranky printer when he opens up a 150 DPI file.

edit: Photozoom is pretty snazzy, thanks for that.

http://www.benvista.com/main/content/content.php?page=ourproducts&section=photozoompro_1

[simplistik]

Well LoL personally I say 300dpi all the way, I NEVER do anything below that it allows for greater detail when you resize your image down as well.

[Anogar]

That was my stand for a long time, but I had a sign maker that printed on glass and lit it from behind and the particular technique that they used really only needed and wanted 100 dpi, it didn't matter at all if you gave them 300 dpi, they'd just have to change the resolution. Certain weird processes have very specific specifications.

[iLikePie]

and also if you're doing a huge billboard or banner, you wouldn't work at 300dpi :P

imagine the filesizes.. mmmm.
i think billboards have something like 30dpi, it's really low (def. less than 100). you can see it when you go up close.

[ya3]

Yep... Your 96x52" poster at 300dpi CMYK would occupy around 1.7gb or RAM :)

I've got a 1250x870mm poster hanging behind me atm. A photomontage made in Photoshop at 100dpi, printed at 1200dpi, and the text is perfectly crisp :)

[mac_crazy]

When I have my designer hat on, what I normally do for large format stuff is work with a 300 dpi file, but at 25% of actual size. This keeps the file size down, and you won't have to resize any other hi-res images that you may want to bring in. Then, whoever's outputting the file can output at 400%, which will turn out to be about 75 dpi, which is perfectly fine for most large format applications (billboards, posters, etc).

As someone else pointed out, the viewing distance is what's key to be aware of. Most billboards are viewed from hundreds of feet away (not to mention at 60mph!), for only a few seconds. 300dpi in those circumstances is complete overkill.

That said, speaking from the production side of things... ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS give your production house exactly what they ask for!!! The guy wants 100dpi at 100%, give it to him. Nothing worse than giving explicit file specs to a designer, only to have them come back with files that don't adhere to those specs.