Making art prints from a vintage book online

June 19, 2015 11:22 AM

I found a gorgeous art book online with images I'd like to make into art prints. How can I do this given that all I have is a sort of cruddy resolution jpg?

I just became aware of this book, Popular History of Animals for Young People. It's gorgeous, and i would love to print this image in poster size to frame and hang on my wall. I have professional printers who could do this given a suitable file. Would it be possible to convert this image file to make it printable and look nice? Or how would I obtain a high res file for print? Even an 8x10 size would be fine, although ideally I'd like it 16x20.

Thanks!

posted by Fuego to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

Best answer: That image won't work, but the book is on archive.org in a much higher-resolution scan. I don't know that I want to download all 2 GB (that's the version of the book you want) to verify the exact size, but it should be fairly high quality.
posted by O9scar at 11:33 AM on June 19, 2015

Response by poster: Thank you! I saw that the book was on archive.org but didn't know if any of the formats would work. I'll try that and see what the printer says.
posted by Fuego at 11:44 AM on June 19, 2015

If I want the best resolution I can find, I use PDF Viewer, a free program, to convert specific pages into images.
posted by Altomentis at 1:00 PM on June 19, 2015

Best answer: Here's the full resolution image. It's from that 2GB+ file. It's a little bit better than than what's on web viewer on Archive.org.
posted by gregr at 2:16 PM on June 19, 2015

If you have a decent digital camera, you can take tight, high resolution pictures of pictures. Funny things come up, though. Suddenly you will see things like the paper has a grain, or the image in the book was dot matrix and not very high resolution at print. For fun I used to photograph renaissance statues, then photoshop beach wear onto tem, and flesh tones. They printed in good size. With sharpening tools in imaging programs you can get more size than you might hope for.
posted by Oyéah at 2:34 PM on June 19, 2015

Response by poster: Wow, gregr, this is perfect! Thanks for nabbing that for me, I really appreciate it!
posted by Fuego at 5:22 PM on June 19, 2015

Copies of the book itself, which printers could scan from, start from US$33.

[Edit: Ignore this suggestion, there is no guarantee it isn't just printed from the Archive copy, with poor resolution. Sorry]
posted by Elysum at 6:21 AM on June 21, 2015