Attached Link: http://www.artbycomputer.com

Just a curious little question. I make my fractals as large as possible, sometimes too big for Photoshop's 30,000 pixel/2GB limit. What sizes do the rest of you work?

Hello and welcome!

I don't work that big - that would blow up my PC!!!! I usually render at 4800x3600 pixels, which gives me an image of 16x12 inches at 300 ppi... i.e. good enough for printing. I would love to be able to get them bigger, though!

Agn :-)

28800px x 14400px!!!! My god! Nothing ever even remotely close to that! :)

Alison,
I don't know if you're replying to me or to Dave... Anyway, here's what I do more precisely. First of all, I'm talking of Apophysis. Let's say that I render a flame at 4800x3600 pixels; if I then open the image in Photoshop, it gives me an image of 66x50 inches at 72 ppi. In the "image size" menu, I just change the resolution to 300 ppi instead of 72, without resampling. The image stays at 4800x3600 pixels, but its actual size is reduced to 16x12 inches. I do that in the purpose of printing my images (300 ppi is correct for a good quality print).

If the fractal is just for desktop wallpaper I render at 1024x768. If I'm making a print I render them at 3200x2384. I only print out at 8.5x11 as I use my printer here. I don't have a hugh pc and a print size/quality render can take anywhere from 16-24 or more hours. Wallpapers take about 10-15 minutes. I doubt I'd have a pc left if I attempted the size you make yours! WOW...LOL ;o)

Heehee,actually it was to Dave but even 4800x3600 is wayy past anything my 64mb RAM,13 gig hd HP could handle. ;)

Attached Link: http://artbycomputer.com

The biggest I've done so far is 24' x 4' @300dpi. That would be 86,400 x 14,400 pixels. This only exists in 3 seperate panels of 28,800 x 14,400 pixels, that is, I don't have any software that will handle that big a file. Post processing has to be handled carefully. I put Pshop into action record mode so I can do the same to the other panels. Having somewhere to display it is also a problem. That particular one took about 20 min/square foot to render. Of course I do this so I can make really big prints and have all the detail.

Attached Link: http://undisclosed-design.exto.org/

i go way beyond the 30,000 pixels, especially when i make designs like the seahorse, the phoenix or the thunderbird etc, and have seen that it says that other versions of photoshop have that limitation, but NOT in photoshop cs (haven't found that yet) ... anyways, my fractals are generated mostly in the size of 5200x5200 pixels @ 72dpi ... and then i change the whole lot in photoshop to 200 till 360dpi in the size of 50x57inches sometimes it comes to 50x78inches ... save all to PSD, in ImageReady edited and saved to PNG and JPG, then thumbnail made in Fireworks for rendero... anyways, i am not around much, busy with making a website, which ya can view at the above link Harmen

Most of my 'pure' fracs are destined for online viewing only, so I don't do much more than 72 dpi at about 1200 pixels w and/or h maximum. But I do save the settings in case I ever need to re-render later for print.
If I am doing a frac for compositing with a Poser figure, I will go as big as my machine allows, so I can do post-render painting, etc. Then I resize downwards for the web.
It all depends on what I forsee as the pic's destiny. grin

2560x1920 or 3200x2400, then I scale it down to 1280x960 or 1600x1200 before saving.

I always do test renders at smaller resolutions and if I like the general composition of it I will blow it up to a decent size. Usually I make things for my own computer as wallpapers and my computer is set to 1400 by 1050. If I want to print it I will make it larger, but I stick to 300 dpi for print resolution. Where do you find Lightjet? Do you own this machine or is it through a separate printing company?

Attached Link: http://artbycomputer.com

I do not own a Lightjet. One of my incarnations is as the lead graphics person at a printing broker. I live in Los Angeles and you can get virtually whatever you want here. I use one main output house for them, and have found 4 others within my easy reach. These are not cheap machines. There is only one machine in the greater L.A. area capable of doing 6'x10'.

Depends on the kind of fractal and the software that I am using. If it's a non-flame UF image, I work small, sometimes 640x480, because I know I can render to whatever size I want and not loose a spec of detail. If it's Apo combined with Photoshop, I work as big as my rendering patients will allow. I usually can't wait around for 3 days for an iteration density of 3000 to render, so those are usually small. I'm still shocked when I hear of large Apophysis renders. Either you guys do iteration densities of 10, or you have supercomputers, or you don't mind waiting for days.

I don't understand why anyone would want to work on a fractal image at a humongous size unless they are rendering an image for print by a professional printer. There's no need for that. I usually work in a 444x333, 444x444 or 640x480 window in Ultrafractal. I used to go thru all the fuss of re-sizing after I was done to 1024x768 (my monitor resolution) for wallpaper, then saving those large parameters and rendering them up to 2048x1536 with anti-alising and then re-sizing back down to 1024x768 for rendered wallpaper. I've only very recently figured out that I was wasting a TON of disk space and time doing that and now I just save the 444x333 parameters and render up to 1024x768 with anti-aliasing and it looks just as good or better than the huge files re-sized down. Not to mention the hours spent pasting 150 layers from a small to a big window. It DOES help to take a look at 1024x768 before rendering to fine tune stuff and then just paste any modified layers back down to the small image and save that. I've got hundreds of meg's of 2048x1536 rendered bitmaps that I didn't need to make! I've found that rendering huge and re-sizing loses a lot of the sharpness of textures and darkens the image, too. Same goes for Apo - the "filter radius" is a blurring filter that coupled with the sample density and oversample handles the task of anti-aliasing just fine and maybe better than rendering huge and re-sizing smaller...I think -lol. Rick

Attached Link: "I'm paying for the bandwidth, you can look for FREE!!"

Rick: You are right. Resizing does lose sharpness, but I _am_ "rendering an image for print by a professional printer". Bigger is better! As for storage I have ~25 DVDs burned full of the stuff, and more to go! On the other hand, all of mine are "pure" fractals, no layers except in one case, the glowing eyes in "Kiss Me, Quick", in my gallery here on Renderosity. 150 layers of stuff seems a lot to handle, though the results can be worth the trouble, as much of the beautiful stuff here attests. Tomorrow, I'll post here a small per/pixel piece of "Smoke", also here on R'osity, to appreciate the detail that extends over the whole 7'x4' work. dr

Attached Link: "I'm paying for the bandwidth, you can look for FREE!!"

Rick: You are right. Resizing does lose sharpness, but I _am_ "rendering an image for print by a professional printer". Bigger is better! As for storage I have ~25 DVDs burned full of the stuff, and more to go! On the other hand, all of mine are "pure" fractals, no layers except in one case, the glowing eyes in "Kiss Me, Quick", in my gallery here on Renderosity. 150 layers of stuff seems a lot to handle, though the results can be worth the trouble, as much of the beautiful stuff here attests. Tomorrow, I'll post here a small per/pixel piece of "Smoke", also here on R'osity, to appreciate the detail that extends over the whole 7'x4' work. dr

Attached Link: http://www.ArtByComputer.com

OK, I put it up. Sorry about the delay - I know you guys were waiting with baited breath....