My experience is mainly in web not print so I'm used to 72 dpi and rgb. I want to create an image in poser - postwork in photoshop and then put it on a print like 8 1/2 x 11 or higher.

My question is, if I render the image in poser at 300 dpi and really large won't it still come out blury when putting it in print because the textures of the clothes, hair or props are at 72dpi?

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There's a bazillion ways to answer this question but, generally, the answer is 'No.' Hopefully, someone who's more awake than I right now will come in and give better details.

I've been printing Poser images for some time and never had a serious problem with textures not coming up to snuff. I use a Xerox laser printer set for default printing at 600dpi, and the images come out sharp as tacks, even when the image I send to print is more like 150-200 dpi. Yep, larger textures are always better, but not completely necessary.

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I bought a Canon i860 color printer and am really thrilled with the 8.5" x 11" prints on matt photo paper. I just returned from a sci-fi mini-convention here at home and actually won a prize for one of my pictures (yay!).

Here's the settings I use for my renders (minus the anti-alias). At 72pixels/inch, the print size is roughly 54". Once in Paint Shop Pro I change the resolution to 200dpixels/inch, which brings the actual printed size down to something like 16" wide. And from there I either use the "fit to page" option of the printer, or force it to the correct size. For anything 11" x 17" or smaller, these settings work fine as long as you have good paper and a good printer. But anything larger than that will require a higher overall pixel/inch setting from the beginning.

I render on a regular basis at 300 dpi and large height/width and have never seen the render look "muddy" from the higher resolution. I have however sometimes had time to read an entire book while it the rendering was going on :) - Noel

awesome, thanks so much for the replys. One last question. When I bring it into photoshop can I leave it at rgb to print out or do I need to change it to cmyk? I was told by someone in the print industry that to print it out, it has to be on cmyk.

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" Yep, larger textures are always better, but not completely necessary. " Note that this is not true. More accurate would be "large textures where necessary within a given scene are better". in an 800 pixel square rendered image, 4000 square pixel textures for that Item that's less than 40 pixels square int he background is not only excessively wasteful, but pretty darn foolish....

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You don't need to convert to CMYK for a normal home printer. They do the conversion for you. RGB is fine to use and will save you some headaches with spot colors :) - Noel

There can be a noticable color shift from RGB to CMYK. One way of doing it is to stay in RGB, and avail youself of the filters etc, but use the CMYK colors. RGB or CMYK depends on the "printers" requirements. The image can/may "look" OK at lower res, but usually "Commerical" Printing requires 300 DPI. You can reduce the size of an image, (within reason) and not lose not lose shartness. Enlarging is another story. The greater the enlargement the more pixelated the image. The lower the res, the less you can enlarge. Say your doing an image at 300DPI or even 72DPI, If you enlarge some 72 DPI of portions of your image, and not others, some portions may look fuzzy/pixaliated and other sections may "look" OK, (on the monitor). If you plan to print the image larger than its current size, you need to increase the DPI above 300 DPI, (depending on the increase).

RE: Poser
The render size is limited to the ram available, the complexity of the image, (number of elements), the 4200 size limitation that Poser has, and your patience, (with rendering time).

Message edited on: 07/25/2004 05:49

Hi hipchick, Don't forget to make sure you save your Poser image to either a TIFF or Photoshop format when you import it into Photoshop! Do not leave it as a JPG. Dee-Marie

I wonder about the final file format when exporting an image from Poser. So far, since I render at the max 4000 pixels, then reduce in Paint Shop Pro, I've not run across any loss of details in the render. Especially since I'm using a home printer. However, I have read that it is best to use a PNG if printing an image with sharp edges (like a bunch of letters), otherwise, JPGs will work fine. Since a majority of my printing is on home-inkjet printers that are limited to 8.5" x 11" sheets, resolution issues haven't affected the images yet. But should I ever hope to print commercially (yeah, right LOL), then the issue of file format would probably be very important.

You can get around the 4090 pixel render limit in Poser by making a one frame image file animation.

Some cases the file format is determined by the client and circumstances. For example, a level 10 JPEG 300DPI broken into three parts Front,Back, Spine, may be required for a cover when you don't have a FTP site. If the client requires a 300DPI, PSD Flat of the entire cover, the file may run 40megs, (or more), and cannot be E-Mailed. In that case you either put the image on a disk, or get a FTP site. PSD-High quality-layers option TIFF- High Quailty Image- but no layers option JPEG-Good image at highter levels of quality

If you have Photoshop 6 or later you can include layers (and all other PS data) in a TIFF but most applications will access only the flattened version it includes.