I have been hard at work trying to get my two latest works into a digital format so I can begin the process of doing test prints. Well, I finally figured out all the quirks and I think I am satisfied with them to the point where I want to see what they look like when they are printed!
First off let me say that stitching together smaller photos into one large photo is a massive pain. Unfortunately this is what I had to do for my two new pieces in order to get them into a digital format. Why? Well let me explain with some math.
I want to sell the works at 24×20″ scale, at 300 pixels per inch. This means the raw file in photoshop needs to be 7200×6000 pixels. Great, thats about 43 MegaPixels. The problem is that even the nice camera I borrowed doesn’t even snap photos at that resolution! It is an 8MP camera that is over half a decade old, and only shoots photos ~3500×2400.
My iPhone also has an 8MP camera, and the pictures I was taking of my works through it looked really good, so instead I ended up using my phone to take the pictures. Because I still wanted really high resolution, I had to take 4 subsamples of the picture and stitch them together with photoshop. I also needed to overlap the pictures some, so in the end I even though I took the 4 subsamples I still could not get the proper resolution that I needed.
In the end, I ended up with 6000×4800 pictures of my final designs, at 300dpi so I think they will scale nicely if I need to make them bigger. I chose that resolution because it coincides nicely with selling prints at 20×16″. So yes, they will be a little smaller than life size but I think it is a well made compromise.
The other four designs left over from RaveNectar I also am going to be selling, and the 20×16″ size works well for them too. They basically just needed to be cropped down and fitted to the proper dimensions. In the end all 6 designs look really good! Check out the gallery here.
What is next? Well I guess I need to get some sample test prints done! Then if I like the way they come out (I don’t see why I wouldn’t), I need to finish setting up my store (populating products and such), test the checkout functionality with PayPal, and that’s it! I’m actually pretty close now that I think about it. So maybe another week or two and everything will be live and running! Awesome!
