resizing pictures

well .... if you took the picture with a traditional camera then the quality of the poster won't be great as it's limited to the grain size of the film.
on the other side, if you took the picture with a high resolution digital camera (higher than 2MegaPixel) then your poster will look great.

you don't want to scan it at actual size and resize using photoshop or any other app.

In your scanner software, set the new dimensions (note that poster size will be a huge file, maybe 100Mb or more depending on the resultion your scan in)

Also, when you open the file in Photoshop or other app, it will be dificult to work in (remember to zoom out)

Rather than scanning the picture in at the highest resolution your scanner supports, then printing the picture off on lots of A4 sheets of paper, I would actually recommend going to your nearest photographer's. Most good photographer's have the facility to blow up pictures (with their shiney expensive equipment!), you can then get the picture printed off at poster size on one sheet of proper paper. The quality will be better, it'll have a more 'proffesional' look and it'll save you time. Although it'll cost a bit of money, but then so would printing off lots of photos on your printer!

If you do decide to scan it yourself, don't forget to sharpen it a little to remove some of the fuzzy/blurey qualities that enlarged photos often have.

I agree with NILKNARF, look in the yellow pages under "copies" of "Reprographics". Most blueprint reprographic stores will do this and do it right. Just stay away from Kinko's, high dollar and poor technicians.

Never work from a scan of a print if you have the negative or digital file available.  Scanning will introduce artifacts of its own, and if you're blowing it up, they will be evident.  If it was a digital and high compression jpeg was used, you are not going to get good results compared to raw or tiff formats.  If you go with a professional, poster-size blow-ups will cost a lot of money, so be prepared to spend a lot of money, like $100 or more if you have it mounted.

Jenny,

I think I have an answer for your question. Without bogging you down with too many details, what you want to do is save the photo as a vectored graphic as opposed to a raster graphic. Raster graphics (such as .jpg or .gif) while compact, tend to lose detail when resized. However, a vector graphic will not lose detail. The caveat is that vector graphic take up a lot more disk space and can be cumbersome to work with - especially if you convert a photo to vector.

However, assuming you have a decent computer, (and some patience to let the computer crunch numbers as it resizes your graphic) this shouldn't present much of a problem. I tried this technique myself in Fireworks 4 and it worked well with almost no loss of detail.

Hope this helps!

Beachdude67

beachdude67

I forgot about vector graphics.
I have a gig of ram so should be able to do this. Will get fireworks and have a go.
TA

I'd just like to say cheers to Beachdude67 as well! That's a good idea that I've never tried! :o)

Thanks nilknarf :)

Glad to be of service Jenny!