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 24x20” scale, at 300 pixels per inch. This means the raw file in photoshop needs to be 7200x6000 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 ~3500x2400.
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 6000x4800 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 20x16”. 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 20x16” 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!