Qualifications for a large poster sized non-pixelated picture

[Karateed]

Hi Guys and Gals,

I am about to venture into creating a poster using a picture that I haven't gotten yet. (How's that for ambiguous?)

I'm wondering what I will need to do in order to get a reasonably non-pixelated poster when enlarging a picture from a smaller size.

Is the most important feature of the picture it's resolution? I know at times I've tried enlarging pictures and they are pretty pixelated after the process. I'm guessing that resolution is the key but I would love to hear from the experts that do this on a regular basis.

I know some of you have made building size signs, are these from pictures or are they from vector creations?

How do you get these to be so clear when enlarging?

Thanks very much for any assistance that you can give me....

[mwenz]

Obtain the largest pixel dimension of the image from the get go. Nothing else matters. Design at a proper scale. Export to PDF (and there are size limitations to a PDF). Large format printers do a pretty darn good job of the scaling up.

Take care, Mike

[Karateed]

Thanks very much for your quick reply Mike and useful information.

[gwpriester]

There is a software utilities/Photoshop compatible plug-in, Genuine Fractals (renamed Perfect Resize 7) that can scale an image up beyond the normal. But it's expensive ($99 US) expensive and works best with a really good TIFF or PSD image. If you have a medium quality JPEG the results will be mediocre.

[steve.ledger]

SmillaEnlarger does a good job with good input quality.. Not too bad with jpg either.
Can't beat the price ;(
► http://sourceforge.net/projects/imageenlarger/

[gwpriester]

count on sledger to come up with a solution.

Just gave it a try at 300% and the results are most satisfactory.

[Karateed]

Excellent replies from all, thank you very much,

[jclements]

I have had very good result's SourceForge's PassWordSafe application. An excellent program.

[Gamerprinter]

Scale and resolution is everything. As long as your image has at least 200 ppi resolution at the near scale that the final map will be, pixelization is minimized. If you enlarge a small scaled, low resolution image to poster size - it will fail in quality. As long as the image is at least 200 ppi+ and near scale size you should haveno problems. It also depends on the printing device as well. Some print techniques work better with low res than others - it depends on the printer.

[Karateed]

Thanks kindly to all for their responses.....