Make Posters From Your Images
Having a big poster that you made sitting on your wall is a great feeling. "Ya, I made that!" But how do you do that and have it look reasonably good? And cheap? I’ve come across a couple of pretty interesting programs that will get you some remarkable results in no time.
Most of us have some form of printer at home, and that’s where the posters are going to be printed from. What?! You say you don’t have a large format printer? Well, I don’t either, but I have my walls covered in glorious posters for the eyes to feast on. Yes, I did it with a standard ink jet printer with regular office paper.
Rastorbator enables you to create large rasterized posters from your digital images, using that regular size printer you have sitting on your desk. Rastorbator creates images made up of visible dots (rasterized), which are designed to appear smooth from a distance (3-4 feet). The dots don’t look so good when you view the poster up close, but how often do you stand one foot in front of a poster? Using the rasterized dots allows you to create ginormous posters. We’re talking 65 feet/20meters. The program can create monochrome or multicolor posters and save them as multi-page PDF files. While it’s easy to use standard office paper, Rastorbator also supports custom demension paper sizes. Once you have all the pages printed from the PDF file, then you just sort them out like a easy puzzle, and get to hanging them up. I’ve found that the best results are when you use a thicker paper, or mount the pages to poster board. Be sure to use a glue stick rather than straight liquid glue. Why? Well, if you use good Ol’ Elmers glue and don’t smear it thin then you will end up with ripples in your paper. We don’t want ripples. Fine on water, not on our poster.
Block Posters is another slick little tool for making posters. Unlike Rasterbator there is no software to download. The entire poster making process happens online, then you download a PDF file with your ready to print poster. Rasterbator also offers this feature if you don’t feel like downloading the program, but there are limitations on size and resolution limits. The results with Block Posters are a bit different looking than what you get with the Rasterbator, but still very nice looking.
