It's been quite a while since I played with Poser, and have forgotten many things. I have poser 11 pro now, updated from poser 7. I'm having a problem with rendering a scene, saving the image as a .jpg or .tif, cropping to the desired size (in GIMP), then placing it on a primitive (in the materials room) to use as a photograph or painting in my scenes. It doesn't happen all the time, and I cannot find any particular reason why it does. I've tried saving as jpeg, png and tiff...doesnt seem to matter. I've rendered in several different resolutions and sizes, but I can find no common denominator as to why some images work fine and some dont. I've also used Hi-res squares, one sided squares and plain flat squares. Any other ideas would be great. Thank you!

Sarah 1 cropped in GIMP on hirez square.jpg

Prop scale and image resolution. Find out your image x- and y- pixel resolution first (i.e., 2000X1000). In Poser, set the x- and y- scale to your primitive by the same dimension, in this case, 2000% on the X- scale, 1000% on the Y- Scale. Import your image, then on your overall scale, dial in your desired size.

Thank you for responding. This is a more detailed look at what I'm trying to do. I area rendered a portion of the scene. Then cropped that section in GIMP. The 3rd image shows the uncropped and cropped images on a hi res square. Then I decided to just try to render THAT, and the other image popped up!! No idea what happened, but oh well. Anyhow, your description sounds simple enough, that even I should be able to do it, but for some reason, I'm missing something and I don't know what. I'm just doing the area renders in the default (680x420 at 72 dpi) for right now, trying to get a handle on this before moving to higher resolutions. I want to put some of these "pictures" in frames on the walls in my poser house/gallery, etc., and I'm able to do it with some of them for whatever reason. I can get the pixel dimensions easy enough from the GIMP photos, but where do I find the pixel measurements in Poser 11 Pro, or does it have them? For a 348 x 544 pixel image (4.83 x 7.56 inches print size) I resized the primitive, but still ended up with a garbled image, at least until I played around with some things and just re-rendered the scene, then it popped up (washed out and hazy, but it was there. But I cant seem to get it to show on "normal" mode, prior to rendering a scene. It's probably likely that I'm WAYYYY overthinking this and got myself all sorts of confused.

What you want to do is take the pixel dimensions of your image and translate that information to your primitive. For example, the default resolution of 680x420 will translate as 680% on the X-scale and 420% on the Y-scale. Load your image, it should look correct. Now use the overall scale to make your image larger or smaller as necessary without distortion.

I am going to use this render as an example. This image is 1028X771 pixel in size.

I load a one-side square primitive prop into the Poser stage and set the X-scale to 1028% and the Y-scale to 771% and then load the image. Connect the image node to your diffuse_color and ambient_color setting its ambient_value to 1. This is the result:

Notice the X- and Y- scales. Now I can rescale the overall primitive to a different scale without any loss of resolution.

This is set at a primitive scale of 50%.

Make sure to use the one-sided primitive square for your canvas. Also, make sure you are on OpenGL. SreeD will wash out the image in preview.

Thank you VERY MUCH!!! There were obviously a few things I didn't know about, like the one sided primitive and open GL. Thank you for your response. Things are working out great now!!