Help me print the Mucha poster I love muchly

November 26, 2011 12:46 PM

I have an old chest of drawers I'd like to spruce up by painting and découpaging a poster on the front, a horizontal slice of poster on each drawer. I've chosen Summer by Alphonse Mucha as the poster, but I have a couple of questions about how to get a poster that suits my purposes.

I love the entire poster, but as with a gorgeous gay guy, the pre-existing orientation is wrong for my particular purposes. I need a poster that is at least 26" x 22" and even the biggest sizes of this poster available are not as wide as that, so I have saved an image off the net and cropped it to a "knees up" version to make it possible to print it to the right proportions without a lot of wastage. Which I'm fine with, but now I need to know:

a) The highest resolution version I could find on the net is 1760 x 1838. Is this high enough to look good blown up in to a poster 26" x 22" or a little larger?

b) Where can I get the poster printed? I need a really good quality art poster that will stand up to being all but saturated with glue and with vivid colours that won't bleed. I also don't want to spend a lot on it — $50 is about as much as it seems worthwhile to spend on this. Can anyone recommend an online or Toronto are poster printer that can do the job?

posted by orange swan to Shopping (8 answers total)

Print quality is generally 300dpi. Meaning 26" = 7800 pixels. So you're taking the vertical dimension and blowing it up roughly 7 times. I'd pop it in photoshop and adjust it to 300dpi to see visually how it's going to look for you. Then you can judge if it's quality or not. You might be better off asking someone on Craigslist to recreate this in vector format for you and then sending that to a printer.
posted by msbutah at 1:28 PM on November 26, 2011

I love this idea. If the image you find online isn't suitable, you could buy the poster and scan THAT at 300 dpi section by section, stitch the sections together to make a mega-image, and get THAT printed to your large format specs. Fussy, but gets the job done.
posted by Lou Stuells at 1:54 PM on November 26, 2011

When you figure out how to get this printed, see if the printer can coat it with some UV protection. You'll be thankful for that in 10 years.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 3:09 PM on November 26, 2011

Response by poster: This poster is going to have three coats of varnish on it. Does it really need UV protection?
posted by orange swan at 7:10 PM on November 26, 2011

Will it be in a spot that gets direct sun?
posted by Lou Stuells at 8:39 AM on November 27, 2011

Best answer: I have had prints made at Toronto Image Works - they do nice work, have a range of papers available, and use archival inks. they're also really convenient, as you can FTP in your image, and go in to the shop to pick it up and pay. They are located on Spadina between king and adelaide.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 5:40 PM on November 27, 2011

Response by poster: Arghh. So, I ordered a small poster online for about $7, took it to Kinkos and had them scan it in and print a poster. And it looked awful. The Kinkos employee told me the scan had picked up the glare off the poster and that there was no way to avoid that. Apparently I need a good digital image of this to have a decent poster made. Where can I get one? Nothing that I can pick up on the net is high definition enough to work.

Does anyone have some ideas?
posted by orange swan at 8:10 AM on February 3, 2012

Response by poster: I ended up just FTPing the highest resolution picture I could find to Toronto Image Works and had them print the poster for me. It wasn't cheap but I did get what I wanted. And I've finished the project. You can see it here.

Thanks all!
posted by orange swan at 8:48 PM on May 13, 2012