PBase

How large can a picture from a D50 (nikon) be printed. I have somebody that wants a picture 8' x7' (feet!)

Is that asking too much?

I know that that you can print any size, but I'm not sure anything would be clearly visible.

It very much depends on viewing distance. Go take a close look at a billboard poster.

Well, you'd be cropping a 6MP picture to approximately 2340 x 2048 pixels. Printed at 8' x 7', that would be 25 dpi. Of course, viewed at two feet away, it would look crummy. However, to view the entire picture, you'd be standing 10 feet or more away, so it could potentially look pretty reasonable.

The big question is who would print something that large? Once you find out, ask them about it. On the other hand, you could crop out a 250 x 200 pixel portion of the image and print it as an 8" x 10" print to see about what it would look like. If you have a color inkjet printer, it would be a snap.

It's for a billboard, they would print it at 100DPi

Here's a link which might help.

http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/forum ... -1166.html

For smaller jobs (in case someone else has a question) here's an excellent site I always check first:
http://www.alamy.com/help/stock-photos.asp

thanks

From my own limited exposure to the world of commercial printing my advice would be to speak to the printer. As your image will be printed on specialist equipment (mutiple sheets I am guessing) the printer technician will tell you what typical resolution they require. I suspect they will break up your image into managable files and print parts of the image seperately. Once you know what resolution they require you can upsample your image using photoshop, photopaint or other similar software. I suspect they will have a maximum file size as well, and you may need to break up the image before you upsample. Alternatively the printer can do all the dirty stuff for you from your baisc image. If they don't know find a printer who does, most are very helpful.

Regards John