Picture Pixel Size for Printing onto A1 Canvas

Hi Guys

We're looking at doing a wedding tableplan and having it printed onto a canvas. I found a website which suggested that for printing in A1 a picture should be around 9000x7000 pixels.

I created a new file in Photoshop in the above size however it seems to be a lot bigger than I need. To get a font that even looks slightly readable it needed to be size 72! And the images we want to use are Parisian Art Champagne Posters such as
http://www.arts-wallpapers.com/vintage/taittinger/img1poster4.jpg

And they just seem to be very small and then when enlarged become very poor quality.

I’ve spoken to a couple of printers who say they print in 72DPI. Therefore what size should I create my initial image?

We obviously want the quality to be decent enough so that the images look quite good and the font is readable. I’m not very good with photoshop at the moment and find that I keep making quite a lot of mistakes (especially when trying to merge 2 images) but at least I’m getting there slowly

If you are using text mainly, then supply a pdf which is resolution independent, although if the canvas printers are limiting you to 72dpi there is not going to be a lot you can do.

Can you not get it printed onto A1 paper?

We could do, although i think we quite liked the idea of it being on canvas. Do you think 72dpi is quite poor for images and text?

I'm trying to re-create my own design using this as a base idea

http://tableplansforweddings.co.uk/portfolio/champagne/

All the printers I use print at 300DPI when it comes to Litho Printing, but for poster printing I have had some decent posters produced for artwork which has been far smaller. One that sticks out in my mind is an A1 poster which was produced from an A5 piece of artwork...

Personally I would be producing at fullsize (with a 3 or 5 mm bleed) and supplying it to the printer as a Tif, or as has been mentioned, if mainly text, supplying as a pdf would be ok to (as long as you embed all fonts!)

Don't forget that when you are putting it together in Photoshop, the chances are you'll be viewing at 25% or similar so of course text will look a lot smaller.

You'd be able to get away with smaller font, just try a small sample at say 48pt in word on an A4 page and print that, see how you like it, it'll be similar size when printed from photoshop.

sHo0sH said:

If you are using text mainly, then supply a pdf which is resolution independent, although if the canvas printers are limiting you to 72dpi there is not going to be a lot you can do.

Can you not get it printed onto A1 paper?

Click to expand...

72 dpi? For print based media? Start at 300 and go up, because physical mediums produce a lot more detail you can't start putting out web/screen based resolutions.
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I'm concerned that your printers will only do 72dpi. Tell them you want a 300dpi print and you have produced artwork to match.

As a side note, PS for this task isn't great. You want a vector image, in which case it doesn't matter the size, it will scale to any without a loss in quality, ergo you want to use Illustrator if possible (otherwise use the pen tool in PS).

Go vector art. Lets u resize as you wish. I agree with the above posters, 72dpi is far too low quality for A1. Adobe Illustrator is what i use for graphic design tasks, and its nearly always set for 300+dpi.

Its best to start with the highest possible quality, then downsize if you're forced to. Most good quality printers will happily deal with 300dpi, some even consider that the lowest DPI for some size of prints

so for A1 at 300DPI your looking at 9933x7016px (i'm guessing thats gonna be about a 200MB file blank.... hope you picked up lots of memory from OCuk for it )