Ive always wondered this, how do people get pictures to the size they do on huge billboards without getting any pixelation, i know you can take high res pictures but some are way too big for it to be straight from a photo is there some software or printing process that does this, please end my confusion
If I'm not mistaken, I think they used 300 res and cut the photo into smaller pieces and paste them together at the billboard. The photo must be big as well. You can used 100 x 100 jpeg to make a billboard picture.
It really all depends on what print shop you use and what their preferred methods are. Some print on pieces, some can now print the entire thing on one giant piece of vinyl. Resolutions can vary, but are generally 300dpi or less. Also when making a billboard you usually work in a smaller scale... something like 1 inch = 1 foot so your file size isn't gigantic. The printers that they use have special software that creates the missing information/ re-sizes it to the final gigantic size. So yes, it is special software. Also, usually they use HALFTONES, which are really used in almost all printed mediums to trick the eye into seeing what your supposed to.
I was wondering this, only slightly differently. In this hotel there was a huge picture of some animals across one wall. The image was still hi res as you walked up to it. It was a fairly big wall, too. How did they manage that?
If it's still hi res at very close range it was probably a very high resolution image. Most billboards are not hi res at close range. There are programs out there that will take a picture and "stretch it out" without pixelizing it. It's not too hard to do. Think of it like this: those old dot matrix printers had a certain amount of space between each printed dot -- imagine increasing that space. There is an online program called The Rasterbator, found at http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/ (I apologize for the unfortunate name), that will do this type of image enlarging.
Rasterbator . Thanks for the help. Except this was close up decent quality, and it was a large wall of a resturant. Plus, the animals in the picture would have been moving, so it would have to have been 1 shot with a very good camera
Not only do printers have special software that allows them to re-size images to a certain extent without quality loss, but you also have to keep in mind that professional photographers have professional cameras that can create gigantic images. There is the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III, which is capable of shooting 21 megapixel images, which roughly translates to a 300dpi image that is about 18 3/4" X 12 1/2". Then there is the Hasselblad H3DII, which can shoot up to 39 megapixels, which would result in an even bigger image to start with.
Yeah... just because it doesn't "look pixelated" from afar doesn't mean that the image is just a super-high resolution photo. The farther away you are, the more blurred these things get.