Sports Posters

MDalby · December 25, 2008

Have any of you had full size 36X54 posters made from your photos? How can I make sure that the posters are going to look OK? If I zoomed in and looked at the noise and the sharpening then I can see what I think the photo details will be blown up in a poster? We are going to present a poster to each of hte basketball players at hte year end banquet.

Any recommendations for success in these posters?

Thanks,

MD

MDalby · December 25, 2008

By the way, I wish SmugMug had the option for full size posters.

This is the site that I am looking to go with. Let me know if you have any recommendations for other providers.

http://www.fullsizeposters.com/?gclid=CLbdx5KJxpcCFRwwawodE3wwSw

Thanks,

MD

Ann McRae · December 27, 2008

Do you mean 36 x 54 or 36 x 24?

I have made a 36 x 24 collage poster and had it printed and mounted onto foam core. My advice is make sure you make sure that all elements are high quality and properly lined up. I made mine in Photoshop and made constant use of the guide/grid lines to ensure everything was lined up. I zoomed in very close, had a good look, and then printed a proof at full size. Only then did I see the very small details that still needed fixing.

Smugmug offers both 24 x 36 inch prints AND the opportunity to print posters with MyCanvas. MyCanvas has a variety of different templates premade for you.

If you really mean 36 x 54, I am not sure where else to go for printing. That is an awfully huge print size!

ann

kenyahudson · December 27, 2008

I printed some football images as 36x24" prints. They came out nicely with minimal retouching and no resizing (on my part). However, these were images shot in good light at ISO 200. I do not permit my indoor sports images--shot at ISO 800 and 1600--to be printed that large. Also, I would check for dust spots to remove before uploading.

MDalby · December 28, 2008

kenyahudson wrote:

I printed some football images as 36x24" prints. They came out nicely with minimal retouching and no resizing (on my part). However, these were images shot in good light at ISO 200. I do not permit my indoor sports images--shot at ISO 800 and 1600--to be printed that large. Also, I would check for dust spots to remove before uploading.

The reason you do not allow this is because the image would not print well blown up to this size?

kenyahudson · December 28, 2008

Without noise reduction processing, the noise is much more apparent (and to my eye unappealing) at 11x17" the largest test print I've done on ISO 1600 images. With noise reduction, I tend to loose fine detail that is not so apparent on screen or in a small print, but is obvious in large prints. For example, there should be dimples on a basketball. Since I shoot mostly in one gym, I'm experimenting with strobing it in hopes of bringing my ISO down and capturing greater resolution and better exposures in-camera.

ASkip · December 31, 2008

MDalby wrote:

Have any of you had full size 36X54 posters made from your photos? How can I make sure that the posters are going to look OK? If I zoomed in and looked at the noise and the sharpening then I can see what I think the photo details will be blown up in a poster? We are going to present a poster to each of hte basketball players at hte year end banquet.

Any recommendations for success in these posters?

Thanks,

MD

I got volunteered to make some football posters this year. They were just 16x20 and since football is at night, the pictures were generally a bit grainy, so I made a collage, so each picture wasn't that big. I had one big picture and 5 or 6 smaller ones around it for each kid.
I made them all (31 of them, one for each senior) in Adobe InDesign. Make one template and then plop the pictures in (use the full size, out of the camera pictures).
I have a D300 too. so you'll probably have the same grain issues.
Even in InDesign, I couldn't tell exactly how the pictures would look until I printed out a full sized test version. and from far away they looked ok. Close up, on my 20" screen, they looked not so great full size.
A regular printing company printed the 16x20 posters for about $9 each, so it was a good deal.
Good luck.

OnDeck29 · January 2, 2009

Not sure about that big of poster
I know big sounds better, and I've done them as big as 24x36... but really I like 16 x 20 - it's big enough to have presence in a room and not too big to overtake it...

are you shooting 3200 iso? noise reduction? noise could be a huge issue at that size...

i've attached a file i'm working on for this year - not finished and probably will replace a few of the pics, but it's something you can look at maybe for an idea - it will be a 16 x 20

mercphoto · January 2, 2009

MDalby wrote:

Have any of you had full size 36X54 posters made from your photos? How can I make sure that the posters are going to look OK? If I zoomed in and looked at the noise and the sharpening then I can see what I think the photo details will be blown up in a poster? We are going to present a poster to each of hte basketball players at hte year end banquet.

I find that images usually look better when printed than they do on a screen so I have a hard time judging noise and such on a monitor. But 36x54 is awfully huge.

Bear in mind, the larger the print the further you tend to be from it when viewing it, so fine detail and such is not always such a big deal. You seldom view large prints from as close as you do 4x6's.

Think about billboards and how good they look from a few hundred feet away. I'm reasonably certain they look like crap when you're up next to them.

My largest prints, by the way, were roughly 5 feet by 7 feet, printed on vinyl in a four-color process, meant to be hung and viewed from a long distance. I uprezzed heavily but was still under 100 dpi in the final file. The results for that intended use were quite good. If anyone has been to Iron Rock Raceway in Austin, Texas in last 18 months or so you've seen it.

Sports Posters

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