Best print usage of Pixelmator Pro features

Talk about Pixelmator Pro, share tips & tricks, tutorials, and other resources.
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2020-04-09 07:22:00

Hi I want to print a 200 cm x 150 cm backdrop on polyester for my bedroom with a 5 mb jpeg image from pixabay.

What settings would you recommend?

1. Use ml super resolution? Which makes it 150 mb As jpeg- they could download it via Dropbox.
2. General cmyk?
3. Jpg or tiff?

Thanks
Oliver
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2020-04-09 12:10:05

First of all, a general piece of advice: for a poster, you really don't need 300 PPI resolution, because you won't be looking at it like you would look at a photo album or magazine. 150 pixels/inch should be more than enough and 150 pixels per inch works out to around 60 pixels per cm.

So, if your poster is 200 cm x 150 cm, that comes out to a pixel resolution of around 12,000 x 9,000. If I were you, I would create a new image with your required size in cm and set the resolution to 150 PPI or 60 PPCM. Then, insert your image into that composition. If the image is smaller than that (likely), you could use Edit > Transform and resize the layer to the required size and use ML Super Resolution as the algorithm.

Soft proofing with a General CMYK profile should work just fine. As for the color profile and file format, I assume you'll be getting this printed at a print shop of some kind and, usually, they have their own requirements. So you'd need to find the place you'd like to print at and see what formats/profiles they require. They may also be able to provide some advice about the resolution/sizes they usually recommend for specific media and sizes.

Good luck and I'd love to hear how you get on with this!
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2020-04-09 22:43:09

by Andrius 2020-04-09 12:10:05 First of all, a general piece of advice: for a poster, you really don't need 300 PPI resolution, because you won't be looking at it like you would look at a photo album or magazine. 150 pixels/inch should be more than enough and 150 pixels per inch works out to around 60 pixels per cm.

So, if your poster is 200 cm x 150 cm, that comes out to a pixel resolution of around 12,000 x 9,000. If I were you, I would create a new image with your required size in cm and set the resolution to 150 PPI or 60 PPCM. Then, insert your image into that composition. If the image is smaller than that (likely), you could use Edit > Transform and resize the layer to the required size and use ML Super Resolution as the algorithm.

Soft proofing with a General CMYK profile should work just fine. As for the color profile and file format, I assume you'll be getting this printed at a print shop of some kind and, usually, they have their own requirements. So you'd need to find the place you'd like to print at and see what formats/profiles they require. They may also be able to provide some advice about the resolution/sizes they usually recommend for specific media and sizes.

Good luck and I'd love to hear how you get on with this!
Thanks Andrius for your dedication, really appreciated. I will let you know.
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2020-04-10 09:56:59

Nice, I look forward to hearing how it goes!
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2020-04-10 10:26:05

by Andrius 2020-04-10 10:06:36 Nice, I look forward to hearing how it goes!
On there description they Said 300 ppi at least... is there a disadvantage if I use 300 ppi?
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2020-04-10 13:13:12

The image will be pretty big and the quality will almost certainly be overkill. However, the only disadvantages would be a large file size and things might be slow. Here are a few places with different recommendations just so you don't think I made this up:

https://accea.net/posters.php (click the Q&A and scroll down to "Can I print in large format using photos from my digital camera/smartphone?")

https://thelondonprintingcompany.com/la ... -printing/ (They say 200 to 300 DPI is a good rule of thumb even for photographs, but for posters, lower works just fine)

Of course, without trying this yourself, it's difficult to be sure and I do understand the desire for caution. Feel free to try creating a 300 PPI image with that size but if things are sluggish, know that you can reduce the resolution without a noticeable drop in quality. :wink:
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2020-04-10 22:02:22

by Andrius 2020-04-10 13:13:12 The image will be pretty big and the quality will almost certainly be overkill. However, the only disadvantages would be a large file size and things might be slow. Here are a few places with different recommendations just so you don't think I made this up:

https://accea.net/posters.php (click the Q&A and scroll down to "Can I print in large format using photos from my digital camera/smartphone?")

https://thelondonprintingcompany.com/la ... -printing/ (They say 200 to 300 DPI is a good rule of thumb even for photographs, but for posters, lower works just fine)

Of course, without trying this yourself, it's difficult to be sure and I do understand the desire for caution. Feel free to try creating a 300 PPI image with that size but if things are sluggish, know that you can reduce the resolution without a noticeable drop in quality. :wink:


thanks andrius i believe you.
What do you mean with sluggish :smiley: ?
I will download the file into Dropbox and the printer company can download it from there.

As it takes a while to be delivered, I only can post the result after a while....

Really appreciate your dedication - really great to have you as an admin here
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2020-04-14 15:22:20

by ResLes 2020-04-10 22:02:22
What do you mean with sluggish :smiley: ?
A little slow. :wink:
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2020-04-14 15:26:42

by Andrius 2020-04-14 15:25:05
A little slow. :wink:
In which way?
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2020-04-14 15:50:11

Well, if you create a very large image (10,000 pixels and more) and apply computationally intensive nondestructive effects/adjustments/styles to it, things might get slow, especially if you add lots of layers. I'm not saying this is guaranteed to happen, but it might. This also depends on your computer, though. A quick check just showed me things work pretty quickly, so maybe I was too hasty in saying performance might drop. We've done pretty well with all the performance improvements over the past 6 months or so! :muscle:
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2020-04-14 16:25:16

by Andrius 2020-04-14 15:50:53 Well, if you create a very large image (10,000 pixels and more) and apply computationally intensive nondestructive effects/adjustments/styles to it, things might get slow, especially if you add lots of layers. I'm not saying this is guaranteed to happen, but it might. This also depends on your computer, though. A quick check just showed me things work pretty quickly, so maybe I was too hasty in saying performance might drop. We've done pretty well with all the performance improvements over the past 6 months or so! :muscle:
That’s true. The performance is great
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2020-04-27 12:39:34

Thanks Andrius. It looks great 👍🏽
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2020-04-28 08:59:54

That's great to hear!