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Rendering for Print

I need to print a movie style poster for my short. Now I know this will sound really newbie, but I have never needed to do this; so how do I render out a still for print at say 20"x30" 600dpi? Or at least something like that.
 
You'll need to set up the resolution - and that's pretty much it.

20"x30" @ 600dpi is 12000x18000 pixels - which I think is in the range for LW (although I may be wrong on that - there might be a 16384 pixel maximum). If it is larger than the maximum size, then you'll need to split it somehow, but it's not something I've needed to do.

I did 18"x42" @ 300dpi the other day (printed onto canvas).
 
600dpi's pretty high - for a poster I'd imagine 300dpi would be more than fine. Often for big stuff (say 2.5m x 2.9m) we produce at 100dpi. It all depends on how close your viewer is going to be to the actual print.

Tribbles pretty much said it all - just multiply the size (in inches) by the DPI needed (dots per inch), so 20" @ 600dpi would be 20 x 600 (20 inches with 600 dots per inch).
 
the best is to ask the company that does the prints, they could tell you what size and resolution you need.
 
Just to expand a bit:

I agree with ingo, and ask the print company if it's the first one you've done. They may know a bit about LW and resolutions, but they may just say "do it at <x> DPI". I didn't put the equations in, but kopperdrake did that for you.

If you want to print edge-to-edge, then you may be asked to provide some "bleed" for the print - this is basically oversized printing, so if you're doing a 20"x30" print, and there's a 0.5" bleed (this is quite large, but easy for the next bit of maths), then you need to do 21"x31" - which means 21x600 by 31x600 resolution (12600x18600). The bleed allows the registration of the cutter to be out by a bit.

If they don't say you need a bleed, then ask just in case - otherwise you could end up with some white down some of the edges. Don't forget that the camera focal length/zoom will need adjusting as you'll want to still have your object in the centre.
 
Actually tribbles - you've just pointed out a feature that I'd love in LightWave - an 'autobleed' which automatically adds bleed to an image. Some briefs are so tight on placement that you need to be so careful when allowing extra at the edges that your main image will still show.

And even though I've been rendering for print for 16 years and have no worries working out appropriate resolutions, I would like to see a 'render for print' option box where you can type in your required physical image size, the required DPI, the required bleed, and when the image is finally dropped out of the renderer, if the file format can handle it, for the dpi to be set within the file.

Dale - sorry if I'm teaching you to suck eggs, but the 'bleed' is just a spare bit of image running round the edge of your image that doesn't matter if/when it gets guillotined off when they cut your poster out of the larger piece of paper it might be printed on. That way your image will run to the edge of the paper. Some places will print your poster in the middle of a pre-cut piece of paper, and will automatically leave a white border.
 
Anything special I need to know about your plugin?

It's not limited to only inches and picas (I'm adding picas support in mine) tells you the size of the resulting pixels, has a bleed setting (which adds all the way around) has presets.
 
I did a large 3'x4' menu for my friends restaurant and I printed it out at 300 dpi with no quality issues. It also depends on what your printing it on and the equipment being used.
 
I need some advice.
I've set the pixels at the right size to render a 300dpi image, but what I don't understand is when I render the image and open it in Photoshop it is 72dpi :stumped:

Is there a way to render so the resulting image is 300dpi when opened in Photoshop?
 
From memory, Photoshop just defaults it to 72dpi. You can change it in Photoshop, but I forget how (it's been a long time since I've used it).

I think you can do it by resizing it - when you change the DPI, the pixel count changes, but you can replace them with the original pixel count.
 
I need some advice.
I've set the pixels at the right size to render a 300dpi image, but what I don't understand is when I render the image and open it in Photoshop it is 72dpi :stumped:

Is there a way to render so the resulting image is 300dpi when opened in Photoshop?

LightWave has no knowledge of dpi, as that's a print concept.

But if you uncheck the "Resample Image" checkbox in the "Image Size" properties in Photoshop, you can set the image to be 300dpi without resizing.

(Apologies if you knew this already).
 
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Thanks Matt for the info about this :)
I did know about what to do in Photoshop, but it's always good to have this info, so next time when the person I'm doing the job for doesn't believe me I can show them from a reliable source that what I said is the same.

It would be good if LightWave could render for print in the same way as Photoshop sets up an image for print; but probably won't be able to happen as you said, it has no knowledge of dpi.
 
Thanks Matt for the info about this :)
I did know about what to do in Photoshop, but it's always good to have this info, so next time when the person I'm doing the job for doesn't believe me I can show them from a reliable source that what I said is the same.

It would be good if LightWave could render for print in the same way as Photoshop sets up an image for print; but probably won't be able to happen as you said, it has no knowledge of dpi.

Did you try my DPI Camera script, which the more I think about it, I think I will add it into LightWave.
 
I have installed and looked at the script GUI, it looks very cool.
I like the presets that are included and the bleed function too; but i've not had a chance to use it yet. Not until my next render for print job (which will be soon)
 
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