Monster Pix – Wussy Cost
This piece of cake is lots of fun
How to make great big poster-size prints from your tiny snapshots is the goal. You will be able to understand how easy that is to do by the time you finish reading the few and easy steps described here. I'm just guessing, but it may be that your joy would not be complete with just “easy.” For that reason I will tell you where I got the computer software used to make those “monster pix” - all for simply downloading the programs to my computer
Equipment and software used
In addition, the camera I used to make those original little snapshots was very ordinary – you could run down to the used camera store and buy one like mine for 20 bucks or so...
Also, the two printers I used to make the posters illustrated here are very ordinary home computer printers. The printer that outputs in color, for example, cost $30 brand new in the computer store several weeks ago, and the other is a plain black-cartridge laser printer of Japanese heritage.
All of the software with which the images were processed was obtained from SourceForge.net, an Internet resource available to all.
Downloadable software for poster-making
Gimp 2.8: an image editor with which you can input photos of one format and output them with another format. Not all image formats work in all programs. Thus changing the original format to another format can not only be useful, sometimes it is necessary.
All you need do to change the formatting of your original image is to enter the image into Gimp and select the format you want, after which you send the newly formatted image to disk storage for later use. Changing the formatting automatically changes the image name, so your original snapshot will be preserved along with the new image.
PosteRazor: an image “splitter” which you use to divide your original photo into the greatly enlarged but equal-size sections you use to create your poster.
PosteRazor prefers that you input “TIFF” formatted images. JPEG formatted images will work within the program, but sometimes PosteRazor loses track of the dimensions of the printout pages. “TIFF” format images do not suffer from that problem. For example, I wanted to make a poster from a “JPEG” image on four printed pages, but the program decided that the output would be on six sheets of paper. When I reformatted the image into “TIFF” format, the output poster was on four pages as I had wanted it to be.
Really EASY - just follow the screenshots below
Here are the poster-making steps as screenshots of program screens on my computer during the making.
Each poster began as a small snapshot. Both of the two snapshots were views of some close-by Houston, Texas downtown areas through the thick glass window of the tall Harris County Civil Courthouse. The posters sized out at approximately two feet square. The posters shown here were not very carefully assembled, and they were printed on ordinary low-cost printer paper. You can assume much better results from the use of better assembly practice and heavier paper stock – like matte finish photo sheets instead of 20-pound typing paper.