I will be printing up a few of my images and am not sure how I should render them. Can you give me a push in the right direction? Also does the size of the image change the render. I really would apreciate any  infor. ,for I am very new to this. Thanks.

Therese

AKA

LottaLagg1!

Are you printing them yourself or taking them to a printer?

i'm taking them to kinko's

I don't know how kinko's works but most printers I know of have Photoshop and can size an image to whatever size you like. It's important that you render it to a very high resolution so your image is not pixelated or suffers from aliasing. Some say around 4000x4000 pixels is good, maybe less if your prints won't be very large. One thing you may find is that your colors don't match what the printer prints. It's therefore a good idea to get a small 'proof' of the image to compare to what's on your screen. If they're not the same, or close enough, then you have some work to do. First is to calibrate your display setup. There are lots of sites that have information on this procedure. Photoshop has a quick and easy program you can install called Adobe Gamma that works pretty good. Let us know how it goes.

Cheers,

Tim

I use 12-13 pixel/mm (about 300-330 pixel/inch) for photopaper.

I want to start to print on canvas, and i think i will use less resolution (8-9 pixel/mm)

The minimum - though it's quite adequate - resolution you want for your prints is 200dpi. This is 200 times whatever the dimensions of the final print will be. So , if you wanted say a 20" by 30" portrait aspect print, you'd render to 4000x6000 pixels. If it was going to be 15"x15", you'd want 3000x3000. Some people go overboard with wanting 400 or even 600dpi but that's really not needed. As long as you've done a good high-pass or unsharp mask sharpen to your finished render, it'll be fine. If you are making a giant sized print, nobody is going to come up to it and stick their nose against it to look at it and look for tiny, nanomillimeter spirals. It will be up on a wall, maybe behind a sofa, and viewed from a distance. I think, as fractallists, we sometimes get all wrapped up in the "infinite" self-similar spirals and the precise minutiae - we're all closet mathematitians! lol - and lose sight of how the works will be viewed by Joe public.

Are you printing Apo or UF pieces? There are different concerns and things to take into account when rendering, depending on which you are doing. I don't know a lot about printing Apo fractals but I'm sure you'd have to at least SOME oversample and Filter Radius to get good anti-aliasing. I'm not sure an Oversampl of "1" will be all that pleasing in appearance, though you could render to twice or 50% larger size, resize smaller with PS or PSP to get an anti-aliased polish and then sharpen. I've never used flam3, just the internal renderer. I get by ok with a Filter Radius around "4" and an Oversample of "2".

With UF, there are different options depending on the nature of your fractal. I've found that if you have very fine, grainy textures that it's best to turn Anti-Aliasing off and render to maybe 50% larger and then resize. it keepes the grain that AA would smooth out. Typically, I use just "Normal" AA. Damien has advised me that if there are a lot of really fine lines to uise "Custom" and set the "threshold" to "0" so that the lines are sharp. You want to make sure you have adequate iterations and bailout so that fine, pointy forms don't have gaps in the lines or clip off square. We see a lot here where a pointed shape is clipped short from too low a bailout. Damien knows a TON about this stuff. I have an e-mail he sent a while back with lots of UF rendering tips. If he gets time to get out of the darn bedroom (he just got married a few weeks ago - lol) and see's this thread, maybe he'll weigh in. Or I'll try to dig it up when i get off work.

You can get reasonably close on your colors and brightness by running Adobe Gamma, which "secretly" :-) installed itself into your Control Panel if you have Photoshop. There are a number of more expensive solutions but I don't know if you'd want to blow a few hundred "bucks", "bob", "samollians, "pounds", "quid" or whatever (lol j/k) on that stuff. The biggest problems I had when I started printing was that the prints turned out a lot brighter than on my monitor - which was set for only 50% brightness - and areas I thought were black/very dark weren't and stuff showed up. A little note - multiply and the other merge modes don't totally black an area out. Neither does Normal with the opacity dimmed. You need to make mask layers to really get that stuff at the edges of shapes gone that you want black/very dark. and make sure that the edges of every mask layer for a certain shape/area is perfectly aligned with all the other instances of that mask layer in the layer stack. Positive AND reverse masks. I've found that you can tell how your print will look if you just print it on 8.5x11 with a laser printer if you have one at home or work.

Whew - I'd better get back to work and at least look busy - cya!

Rick

Laser print has only 4 colors. To do good color prints you should use 6 colors. Laser has more detail but is not so good with colors.

I only meant to try a laser print to get an idea of what "surprises" might show up in the print before having it professionally printed. Many pro printers will charge like $75 per a half hour of tweaking the colors and/or brightness. This happens once you get your - many times paid for - "proof" print. If you aren't happy with it then they charge to fix it the way you want it. Best to try to take care of this as much as possible beforehand and save $$. A laser print or maybe even a good photo print on a very good home printer will show you a lot of things you might not have seen with an uncalibrated monitor.

This can become a real problem with online printers. You could end up spending weeks - and $$ -  having proofs done, sent by mail, rejected and redone. I was lucky in that I found a decent master-printer that was close enough that I could drive there and supervise the print. The first one, he did charge me $65 to tweak the colors and brightness on because my monitor was WAY out of cal and set much too dark. The guy is cool and doesn't make the bulk of his living off of printing but from travelling to art festivals a few times a year and selling his photo-manip pieces and straight photos. Since I was able to go there (he was actually going to let me bring and set up my pc to show him how the print needed to look - lol) I saw how his rig was set up and used Adobe Gamma to very closely duplicate the look on HIS monitor and printer output on my pc at home. Now I just bring a cd and he prints it without tweaking. Except one that he really felt strongly about and tweaked the colors anyhow. He didn't charge me and I agreed that his version was better. Cool old guy!

Rick

My print guy uses an 8 color Epson printer - the 9800. I'd love to have one of my own but probably couldn't afford the media and ink. Kinda like if a guy won a $1 million lottery and bought a $1 million boat with the money. He'd have the boat but couldn't afford to buy the gas for it - lol.

Rick

wow thanks for all the information. .

Therese

i'm using UF4 and render one linerar pass a with it off at 2. I want the detail to be seen well. I must say with my learning disabitly so it is harder for be to comperhed all that i read and write. I went over what you you wote and think I got the just of it. . Thanks

Therese

Rykk,

You are a very kind person, and always here to lend a hand and share your expertise.