workflow map managment for high def print Add

[fraggle]

That's a print resolution, you don't have to render to that.

Do you mean that print is not the same than screen resolution?
A render to 600Dpi/A3 in max = 9921x7015 pixel

The question may sounds stupid, but we are not in print field at all.

[Neilg]

Retina displays (where the pixels are smaller than the human eye can make out) are about 330 ppi. (at a3 that's 5.4k across) that's on a phone you hold close to your face - the mac retina displays at standard monitor distance are only about 220 (which gives a resolution of 3.5k across for a3)

dpi is a print term - it's how many dots make up an area. you can go up to 1200 and it will still make the image look better because it contributes a lot to how vibrant the colors look and how nice the blacks are, but as far as feeding it cg goes you dont need to give it anything rendered higher than 300dpi which has been scaled up in photoshop to the equivalent it's printing at.


Render at 5k, do all you post work & photoshop, totally finish the image (sending them the 1200px wide ones to proof or whatever you do) and then when it comes to deliver for print, save out a 5k final image & scale it up to whatever resolution they need.
You could even get away with 3k wide and a good image scaling software.

e: dots per inch is just the printer doing it's thing, you can ignore that & any client who needs that resolution. just render to 3k wide if it's a4, 5k if it's a3, and if it's bigger and banner sized - still just 5k, because people will be looking at it from further away. Once you're completley finished with the image, scale it up to whatever dpi the client is asking for so they dont get confused and try and argue with you about it. hopefully you'll be sending these straight to the printer so the client wont zoom in to 200% and ask why it's blurry at fullscreen (despite that being a 1mm area on the print)

[fraggle]

You could even get away with 3k wide and a good image scaling software.

Thanks a lot,
What do you mean by good image scaling software. Is Photoshop not good at doing it?

[joconnell]

The built in ones aren't. If you go from a 2k image to a 4k image in one jump for example, photoshop is making up a huge amount of data on it's own - since the new image is twice as big horizontally and vertically, it means that photoshop is making up 75% of the picture. There are other plugins and programs that do what's called "stair interpolation" which means that rather than taking one big jump, they do multiple resizes of the image in maybe 10% increments each time until they reach the final size. It means that each time they're using more of the original data when making new pixels, so it's more accurate.