Resolution when printing out posters of game art?

onewinged

Hi everyone,

hopefully I’m posting this in the right section.

I’m planning to reachout to concept artist to request/purchase image files so I can
use a Printing service that makes poster. Then I can put cool stuffs on the walls of my apartment.

I was wondering if anyone has any knowledge at what images resolution I should ask the artists for? Any specific pixel resolution and/or DPI/PPI (Is any of these even used in this context)

What have you guys been successful with?

Planning on doing posters in the following dimensions

90x60CM
60x60CM
60x40CM
45x30CM

I read somewhere that you should have a minimum of 2300 x 1700 pixels for 90x60cm not sure if that's true.

Any information would be great really.

Cheers Tim

pior

Hello -

If anything, the best thing you can do at this time is to get very familiar with printing images in general. Judging by your post it seems that you don't quite grasp the concept of dots per inch and the way it relates to printing a pixel-based image - which is totally fine, as it can be a bit confusing at first ; but it is also very straightforward after printing just a few pictures.

In other words, make sure that you understand what's happening here :



As for contacting artists : well, none of the DPI talk will be relevant because they are not going to repaint their images for you anyways. So all you'll need from them is the higher res they have. Hence in practice, this is a non-issue.

As a matter of fact the complex part is not so much the printing itself but rather the question of what kind of rights you want to acquire on these images. You would have to be very, very clear about your intentions.

onewinged

You are completely correct don't really have any real knowledge prior to the post. Thanks for making things clearer.

In regards to the followin:

pior said:

As a matter of fact the complex part is not so much the printing itself but rather the question of what kind of rights you want to acquire on these images. You would have to be very, very clear about your intentions.

Simply have to do some research on this as well. A artist should never be compromised and should be fairly compensated.

jStins

It would be awesome if art station had a feature that allowed artists to upload high resolution images that could be purchased as a high quality print. (With the majority of the profit margin going directly to the artist of course.)

onewinged

jStins said:

It would be awesome if art station had a feature that allowed artists to upload high resolution images that could be purchased as a high quality print. (With the majority of the profit margin going directly to the artist of course.)

If this was a thing i would most certainly use it.

musashidan

3ds max has a print wizard. Here are the figures:

A4 @ 300dpi = 3507x2480
A3 @ 300dpi = 3507x4960
A2 @ 300dpi = 4960x7015
A1 @ 300dpi = 9933x7015
A0 @ 300dpi = 9933x14043

zachagreg

jStins said:

It would be awesome if art station had a feature that allowed artists to upload high resolution images that could be purchased as a high quality print. (With the majority of the profit margin going directly to the artist of course.)

There are sites like this that exist currently. Society 6 is one that I've used before to get various prints to people. While I do agree with you that it would be great for Artstation to offer this one stop shop kind of deal with printing and portfolio the reality of it is it's just not their market currently and would have large upfront costs to get this sort of feature going at a stable and affordable rate. May one day happen but the other sites that exist are great options as well. 

Printkeg and CatPrint are another two sites that offer similar services.

drewmacstudio

onewinged said:

jStins said:

It would be awesome if art station had a feature that allowed artists to upload high resolution images that could be purchased as a high quality print. (With the majority of the profit margin going directly to the artist of course.)

If this was a thing i would most certainly use it.

Deviant art has had this for a long time. 

drewmacstudio

If you're licensing the work they may license by resolution should be able to get away with about 150dpi (not sure of the conversion to metric of the top of my head)

The trouble is that a lot of what you're gonna find in concept art is designed to fit a screen, so it's 16:9. The formats you listed are all over the place, some wider, some narrower, one square. You're gonna have to crop the images to fit the formats you want. If you're not going through a place like Society 6 or Deviant art (which may not offer the formats you want and/or may do some janky auto cropping) I'd recommend downloading a trial copy of Adobe InDesign, setup files in the print sizes you want  and put in whatever low-res version you can find on the web to see how the cropping and composition looks, then get a high-res from the artist. With InDesign there's an info panel under Window that tells you what the original dpi and the effective dpi (what it will actually print at after scaling and cropping) as long as you can keep that over 150dpi the print will look fine.