I told you yesterday that I was left without a viable solution for printing my photos. Well, my friends, as the title goes, Great News!

I stumbled today upon a store that advertised ‘large blueprint prints’. They were very helpful, prepared my JPEGs for pre-press and made the best use out of paper to ensure I did not pay more than necessary. It took us some 15 minutes to prepare for printing, print and cut the photos.

Ooohh, and they were kind enough to let me email myself the correct profile! They did not try to convince me that their machine was too smart to need profiles…

I printed two photos today, from the Transalpina Set. They were both very large panoramas. One id this shot of Muntinu and the other one is the lake Petrimanu shot below.

I was right: these photos DO look better in print than on the web. You should see them for real – you can distinguish every grass blade, every sand grain, and every skid mark in the sand, with absolutely no artifacts. To get an idea about this, here is a 100% crop from this photo:

It looks like this if you hold the 90cm picture at 10 cm to you eyes, but do you really watch large photos this close?

Here are several reasons why I absolutely need to print photos:

1. My grandmother is old and very ill, I like to show her all the beautiful places where I’ve been. I cannot show her on the computer because of her poor sight, I need to print BIG.
2. I like to print BIG because I can – I have photos that not only CAN be printed LARGE but also look better printed large.
   Let’s take this shot of Lake Petrimanu for example:

   

   It is 90 cm wide at 300dpi. That means that you have a picture almost 1 meter wide that shows NO pixelization at 10 cm from you eyes. You can distinguish the sand, with no artifacts. I could print these at 200dpi and show them from farther, and still get incredibly sharp photos.

3. If you want to show your pictures on a wall (like in a gallery), they need to be big. A3 is the MINIMUM for hanging on a wall.
4. I am sure a lot of you would like to get some of these photos for your office / homes. Would you rather have a 60×90 picture or a 13×18 hanging on your wall?