Ok to print at this size?

A friend sent me a photo to extend. It's a wedding shot on the beach. He wants to stretch it on one side to make it 20" x 62.5"

The "original" he sent me is only 2000x1333px @ 150 pixels/inch

I'm not good with big prints, but isn't his pic nowhere near big enough to be printing at 20" x 62.5"?

speedy_2 wrote in post #11469916
I'm not good with big prints, but isn't his pic nowhere near big enough to be printing at 20" x 62.5"?

The aspect ratios are 3:2 vs. about 3:1.

But IMO, you simply don't have enough pixels to crop to a panoramic aspect and enlarge it to 20 x 62.5.

Yeah. I'm trying to extend the shore/water out to gain the proper aspect ratio. But, I didn't even want to start if the initial size isn't big enough in the first place.

Just so you know, your pixels per inch figure has no meaning without a size in inches -- it's just a value that gets plunked in the exif. If you want to know how that will play out with the image, open it in Photoshop or whatever image editor, and in the Image Size/Resize dialog, enter one of the desired values in inches and have the option to retain the aspect ratio selected. You should see the other dimension filled in for the actual image you have, and see the ppi number reflecting that.

And yeah, you are talking some major doctoring and a huge enlargement for that job and you may not be happy with the results. Part, of course is how much doctoring you need to do -- some images you can actually enlarge by using either the cloning tool or, as a last result, creative borders, to alter the size and dimensions. When you've done all the doctoring you can you can try to resize/resample the image to a print size that will meet the requirements of your lab then apply some "output sharpening" to get the details to "pop" a bit, then look below for my test suggestion.

It's up to you as to whether you really want to do this, maybe post the image here to get feedback and ideas. And then, if you've gone as far as you can, save some expensive heartache and use a close crop from the image and print out say an 8x10 of the crop and view it at a distance and see for yourself how it will turn out.

2000 pixels on the longest side, to be printed to 62.5" will give you a ppi of 32 before re-sizing, which really is too low.

To get it up to a more acceptable 200 ppi, you are going to have to resize the long side of the image to 12500 pixels. Personally I don't think that is doable without turning the image to mush, but I have to admit that I have never tried to resize an image by that amount before.

32 ppi to 200 ppi is more than 6X. Genuine Fractals claims to be able to do that well, but I've always been skeptical. Still, you could download a trial and give it a try.

He's gonna send me a 10MP version of the pic. Thank goodness.

Ok. Here's a resized pic after getting the aspect ratio and dimension right. But, no copied beach yet.

I'm not even sure about trying to stretch it out and it looking halfway decent. I'm using Photoshop CS3.

Your posted image is way off on the dimensions, but you could offer him an 8x10, an 8x12 or an 11x14 at an OK quality and tell him that any larger will be not-so-good. If he insists, have him sign off on a not-sso-good image.

For that shot, yes, you can get the long dimension longer by stretching the canvas and cloning in Photoshop -- give it a try, and see if the effort is worth it, since you still will sacrifice print quality.

And now, this is a stab in the dark -- is this a "CD copy" of a shot taken by a hired wedding photog? If so, they often deliver a set of photos that can give decent prints at, say, 8x10, but to go larger is barking up the wrong tree, quality-wise.

And, if it's not your photo you should post a link, not the actual photo, unless the photog has released copy right privelidges to you!

This pic I posted was resized and the white area is the area I will need to clone the beach. The original I finally got from him is a a 10MP photo. So, it should work a lot better than what I originally started with.

OK, help us out here -- you said the original was 2000x1333 pixels? As in 2MP?

No. he found a larger one.. 2504x2336 I guess 5.8MP? he said 10, but I don't think it's that large.

OK, that is basically a square image. So, you want to thing both in terms of end aspect ratio and end resolution.

Common wisdom sets an "optimal" print resolution at about 300 ppi. So, say, an opimal 10x10 print resolution would be 3000x3000.

For your image, let's say we slashed that 300 ppi to 100 ppi for a "much less thatn optimal print resolution". That would give a print size of about 23x25 inches.

So, you can see that 20x60 is totally unrealistic for this image, right? You would not want to slash stuff from the top and the bottom just to make the image wider.

If you want, you can stretch out the canvas to produce a lot of white border at the ends to come up with a 20x60, that's up to you and your friend.

I'd personally be more inclined to offer him a well-done smaller print.

speedy_2 wrote in post #11484026
I'm not even sure about trying to stretch it out and it looking halfway decent. I'm using Photoshop CS3.

That's a shame. Content-Aware Scaling should be just right for this -