Making Your Own Giant Posters: A Beginner’s Guide
If you’ve ever gone looking for that perfect piece of big beautiful art to hang in your home, you probably know by now that big art costs big money. Even if you settle and purchase a mass produced canvas, like the ones found at Pier 1 Imports or Ikea, you still have to deal with lugging that huge painting around or paying someone bring it to your home.
If these options aren’t available to you or if you are a little budget conscious, there are a couple of easy solutions that you can use to print larger posters from the cheapest printers.
Image is Everything
When you decide that you’re going to print out your own giant poster, the first thing that you must consider is the image. Regardless if it will be printed in full color or black and white, it is important to make sure that you use a bright image that provides a lot of contrast. It can be a picture of your dog at the park or you sunbathing at the beach, these are all fine choices. However, that dim, blurry photo of you and your friend at the club should definitely be removed from your list of poster picture candidates. Not only is it going to look awful, but it’s going to use up a lot of ink.
In addition, it’s important to note that, if you choose to print out pictures that you find on the internet, without the permission of the owner or if you don’t own their copyrights, you may be committing an illegal act. We do not encourage or condone the illegal distribution or duplication of copyrighted content.
Processing & Printing
Once you have saved the chosen image as a digital file on your computer, it is now ready to be processed, or formatted, so that you can make sure you get the look that you want. This sounds complicated but usually all this step involves is enlarging the image and printing out the separate copies. If your computer doesn’t have the capability to do this, sites like Faster Poster and Block Poster will enable you to do these kinds of basic chopping and scaling, plus you get a downloadable PDF that will enable you to print your giant poster quickly and easily.
Although these types of photo enlargements don’t provide the best results, they’re still cool in their own way. They also provide some insight as to what the overall effect would look like if a large format printer was used. Unfortunately with this method, it’s easy to spot the seams between the pages and the color printing quality of full sheets of color images tends to push the limitations of the majority of consumer printers. But that doesn’t mean that you should give up on this method; it’s perfect for small projects like printing a garage sale sign or a banner.
Download Rasterbator
If you are looking for a way to create a poster that you can hang on your wall and that will stand the test of time, download the Rasterbator program. Despite the questionable name, this free program is quite harmless. The Rasterbator program takes things a bit further than the ones mentioned above and applies a halftone filter to the image; this technique is used on pictures that appear on billboards and newspapers. To be honest, the result may seem abstract if you look at it too closely, however when it is seen at a distance, the effect is pretty awesome. The abstraction effect will also make things easier when you are trying to stitch the poster together.
One Final Tip
No matter which process you go decide to utilize, the end product is still a stack of printed pages that you have to spend a decent amount of time cutting and gluing together. Needless to say, it takes time and patience to get a good result, but there are some shortcuts you can take to speed things up a bit. For example, if you use a sharp paper cutter to trim the edges around the image, your cuts would be neater and it would make things easier when gluing the arranged pieces to posterboard.
If you don’t’ have the patience or the posterboard, trim the edges from alternate pages and place them on top of the uncut pages. Try using a glue stick and taping the seams on the back of a finished poster to give it added strength.