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.

Tags: posters, DIY, poster, PDF, art, lifehacks

For a long time I would place my graphic art work all over my hard drive.  Nothing made a lot of sense where it was placed.  I’d have some inspiration, start a project and place it in a new folder somewhere, and never work on it again.  Kind of the "out of sight, out of mind" principle.  I wasted hours and hours of quality time and sweat only to misplace a file or two.

I know that some of you have to be the same way I was, looking all over your hard drive to find a project that you were working on, and not even remembering what you named it.  I’m not gonna go into a lot of detail on how to get organized.  It seems someone has done a much better job explaining than I ever could.  Outlaw Design has done a great job showing you what to do.  Heck, I even found more ways for me to get organized.  I encourage you to check out this very useful info.

Tags: organized, files, art, graphics, organizing, hard drive

Often you will see on websites and print images that are blurry and pixilated. The usual problem starts with trying to get an image that is one size to fill a space that is much larger than the original image. Just because an image looks sharp with a size of 100×100 pixels doesn’t mean that it’s going to look sharp once you try to blow it up to something like 200×200 pixels. Of course we are speaking of raster images, not vector. Raster graphics cannot scale to a higher resolution without loss of apparent quality. A good example of a raster image not scaling to a higher resolution (larger size) can be seen when you try to take you digital photos from your camera and try to make a poster with them. There are "tricks" around this though, and that will be covered in a later post.

Here is an image that was made with 72 ppi ((Pixels per Inch) at a size of 200×200 pixels.

Here is an image that was made with 72 ppi ((Pixels per Inch) at a size of 100×100 piles, and scaled up to 200×200 pixels.

Many people don’t seem to see a difference between the two images if they are both not side by side. But look at that 2nd image. It’s blurry and all around rather poor looking. I think the reason that many people don’t acknowledge the poor image is because they don’t know better, or maybe they just don’t know how to overcome the problem. Odd… But, since you are reading this, you are starting to grasp what the problem is and what you need to do about it.

If you where planning on making an image to fit a certain size then make sure that you start off with proper resolution and size first. A good rule of thumb is to have your web graphics be at least 72 ppi and your graphics that will be printed be at least 300 ppi. You can go lower than 300 ppi, but I feel that 300 ppi is best and is an easy number to remember.

For many years I’ve used Adobe Photoshop for almost 90% of my digital work. It’s very robust and has almost everything that I need, but it’s not for everyone. Photoshop is expensive and it has an extremely high learning curve. They teach college courses on this program, people. If you have a own Photoshop and have a good grasp on it already, then that’s great. But if you are like many people, you don’t have this wonderful program, and your using something else. There are plenty of great alternatives. Let’s look over a few.

• Photoshop Elements: This Adobe program has a great deal of what Photoshop has, but is more designed for the novice and possibly those on a budget. Photoshop Elements will get the job done for you with great results. However if you are a wanting to be a professional graphic artist or have a photography business, then Photoshop is the way to go. It offers the proper tools for color management and more editing features. If you don’t plan on making a career with graphic arts or photography, then Photoshop Elements is worth your time to check out. Current price $99.99

• Paintshop Pro Photo X2: Corel makes this fine program that is a competitor to Photoshop. It has a very clean and easy to understand interface. I’ve enjoyed this program, but it’s more designed to manipulate existing photos than creating. Don’t get me wrong on that last comment however. Paintshop Pro Photo X2 can also be used to create new images. Current Price: $99.99

• GIMP: This slick program is often lauded as the "free Photoshop". I don’t have much personal experience in this program, but I can tell you that for a program that is free, yes I said FREE, it’s very well thought out. GIMP is an open source program that people all over the world are very passionate about. Many of these people contribute to the continuing development of the program. Current Price: huh, FREE

A great resource for other free photo editing programs can be found here. Free Photo Editing Programs

Give thanks to Sue Chastain for putting together such a comprehensive list.

This being a new blog, you can expect some layout and graphic changes here and there till I get it the way I like it. Crazy blog software. I’ll figure it out. First lessons will commence very soon. So, site back grab a donut and have just a smig of patience. Not much longer.

I don’t pretend to be the worlds best digital graphics artist, but I do know what works. For sometime I labored with my art only to have people just look at and… well put it this way, they didn’t really care for or not care about it. I was missing something. What was it? Actually several things. Are you an aspiring artist? On a whim purchased a photo editing program? Been doing this for awhile with dismal results? Well, fear not. Grab your favorite beverage, sit back and try to learn something. I use Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Illustrator mostly, but I will dabble in other available programs as well. Most of the time it will not matter what graphic editing program you use to learn something from here. I base this knowledge on experience and basic and advance principals. Let’s have some fun. Comments are always welcome. This is my first blog, so who knows what to expect. Thanks for stopping by, Mr. Boogie

Tags: digital artists, photoshop, illustrator, help, graphic artists