Backscenes

[Lawrence]

I have had this page  http://shiagenin.michikusa.jp/haikeigazou.html bookmarked for some time, I wondered if anyone had tried getting these printed out in banner form as I have found a place that will do a 12" x 72" print for about £10 but am unsure whether or not the definition would hold up to that size of print.

Any help appreciated as always.

[disturbman]

Damn imperial system! Give me metric. ;)

 

More seriously, seeing the dpi of those pictures, I don't think it will hold correctly for such a big surface. You should aimed to find images with at least 300dpi, not 72 (meaning the pictures should weight several Mo instead of hundreds of Ko).

 

Plus, the colors look a bit odd on several shots.

 

And this one is a definite no-no, you can almost see some sort of structure like it already is a scan of a print.

[Densha]

I think half of the members here has that page bookmarked, but then again I think that the quality of the images isn't too well too. I posted these here some time ago, but most have a small resolution too. That's really a pity, there's so little good suitable background images available.

[Hobby Dreamer]

Damn imperial system! Give me cubits. ;)

[disturbman]

I think it might be possible to find some suitable background pictures on panoramio. Quality can be impressive there.

[Densha]

Here's what the backgrounds of the first linked page look like when used: http://shiagenin.michikusa.jp/n-gauge.html

[Lawrence]

Hmmm, that's a bit of a bummer, probably the best rural images I've seen.  Had a look at the panoramio site but they don't look like they would adapt well to backscenes  

 

Also just found this  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nakchivan_Panoramic.jpg  it's 5000x969 pixels, any ideas on what that would stretch to (metric, imperial or cubits!)?

[Densha]

Totally agreed, if anyone finds any great scenes with a more reasonable quality I would love to see it too!

[ToniBabelony]

To be honest, I think backgrounds on layouts should be a bit blurry, not to draw too much attention to them, plus create a sense of forced depth as well. I have no personal experience, so I can't tell for real, but I'll be doing such things when in Japanland if I have the opportunity to work on some sort of layout thingie.

[KenS]

I don't think you could make a good-looking 72" banner from that, unless you were viewing from more than typical layout distance.

 

3300 x 900 pixels at 150dpi would be 22" x 6" (56 cm x 15cm).  That's suitable as-is for about a 3-4' (~1m) viewing distance. Any larger, and it's going to be obviously blurry.  You also need to worry about the quality of the camera used. Looking at those full-size, I see some odd graininess in the sky that's going to look bad (I think it might have been scanned from a print or something) and some graininess in the trees that looks like the image was over-sharpened to correct for a lack of detail.

 

That isn't necessarily bad, if you can keep the viewer's eye away from the backdrop.  On the other hand, if there is track or other things to draw the eye close to it, the blurriness will be a problem.

 

If you have something like Photoshop Elements, you can increase the pixel count.  It's interpolation, and doesn't do a great job, but you can probably double the effective size (meaning it could be 12" tall for normal viewing distance and not too blurry). There's also specialized software that will do a little better (not a lot; don't believe the hype).

 

Bigger is always better for the source.  For my 4' long (1.2m) backdrops I used one image that was 3,000 pixels long, and first doubled it in photoshop, and it's not too bad. I also used a couple that were 3500 pixels (also doubled in the first attempt), but taken with a better camera (more real info in those pixels) and they looked good even at two feet.  For the final version I used special software and more than doubled the pixel count, and the good ones look incredible (but the 3,000 pixel one still only looked "ok" because of the camera used, a cheap point-and-shoot rather than a good DSLR with a quality lens).

 

For more about what I did, see my pages on Making Backdrops, and Enlarging Images, as well as my set of images used.

[cteno4]

Actually a photographer friend was teaching a digital photo workshop with some other folks (she was doing the shooting part and the other folks the post) that did a lot of pro work with some of the res up software packages.

 

She was dubious of these as well, but was quite amazed at what they could do up to 3x and even greater. Granted these packages were like $200-400, but it worked.

 

Jeff

[Lawrence]

Ken, your skills and equipment are clearly beyond anything I could hope to achieve  I had a look at your site and quickly became confused, I will have to go back and read it again.

 

Thanks for your help, I shall continue my rural backscene quest 

[KenS]

Actually a photographer friend was teaching a digital photo workshop with some other folks (she was doing the shooting part and the other folks the post) that did a lot of pro work with some of the res up software packages.

 

She was dubious of these as well, but was quite amazed at what they could do up to 3x and even greater. Granted these packages were like $200-400, but it worked.

 

Photoshop Elements alone will do 2x fairly well.  I used a $100 package (Perfect Resize, formerly Genuine Fractals) and it did at least another doubling (4x total) at the same high quality, and a but more (~5-6x) was on the edge of acceptable.  The software implies 8x will be acceptable, but I didn't find it so.

 

However, 4x means that 22" backdrop could be made 72" (or more) long with acceptable quality, assuming the image was good.  I'd still have some qualms about the source image here though, as the level of graininess in them could interfere with any enlargement process.