Help with a wide outback or rainforrest photo

It might be better to let people know roughly how many pixels wide and how many pixels high you need. A picture at 15mb could be a square or a long skinny strip. And a picture with lots or small details eg lots of trees would be a bigger file size than a picture with less tonal detail eg a sand dune.

It is not what you are looking for but a photo I have taken of Wanna Cove is 16.5mb and measures 11353 x 2873 pixels. Printed at a normal photo resolution of 300dpi this would be about 1m long by 0.25m high. I Imagine a splash back would be printed at a lower resolution.

I'll give you a holler when we get home (about 2 weeks). I can do you a panorama as wide as you want.
The only drama is with all the rains recently there is not much red desert where we live.
Used to do sighnwriting so know what the art guy is after. Sounds like a fun project.

Dru

Hi mate,

You said you have a 550D so if you have a tripod and a basic knowledge of photoshop you can easily do this yourself. I think it's a great idea for a splashback but how much prouder of your kitchen would you be if you took the image yourself! There are a couple of things to consider with a panorama especially when it comes to printing. I'm not sure if you are wanting the image to cover the whole splashback but at 4.5m you are going to need a file size much larger than 15MB.

Another thing to consider is the distance with which your splashback will be viewed. Is it something you want to admire while you are cooking up a steak or is it more something to add to the overall aesthetic of the kitchen itself? It's important not to confuse PPI and DPI. PPI is the resolution of the image itself and DPI (or Dots Per Inch) is used for the printing resolution. If you consider a large billboard on a highway it is generally printed at aroud 30 DPI as it is being viewed from a long distance but if you were to walk right up to it and view it from a couple of feet away all you would see are big blocky pixels. So as a general rule the further away the image is being viewed from the lower the DPI used. This setting can be changed before printing from an image of any resolution but as a starting point the higher the better IMO.

OK getting back to doing it yourself. All pro's that print their own large panorama's will almost exclusively do so by using more than 1 image. That is, when they shoot the scene they will take anywhere between 4 and 20+ photo's of the same scene and overlap each shot by 10-20% depending on how large a file they want. They will then stitch the files in Photoshop, PTGui or some other such stitching software to create a seamless high quality, high resolution panorama. There is some very basic info here on how to do it.

http://dslrblog.com/how-to-shoot-a-panorama-with-a-dslr/

It's better to shoot your pano in portrait mode and include areas you do not want in the finished scene and overlap rather than landscape mode as there is more room to crop out unwanted areas of the scene once the image is stitched. Once you have shot and stitched the image you will have a great high quality/high resoltion image to play with. Give the file to a lab and tell them what you want and let them do all the hard work with regards to resolution/ppi/dpi etc but at least you will know you have given them enough to work with and it will be something of your own! Good luck!

Craig

Just for interest's sake, both cameras I use take panoramas automatically. A Sony A55 DSLR and a Sony HX9V.

If you have a look through my blog

GB in a BT

Particularly July to September 2011 you may see some you like. If you do, send me a MM and I will email them to you.

The pictures on the blog have been reduced but the originals are fairly high megapixels. I have had a canvas print made from one that was 1500mm long so they may work for you too.

Graham, Grunpy, John, Cruiser and Bushie.

An update.

Yesterday I went out the back and took a bundle of photos across our house at the Brindabellas. I downloaded a trial copy of Photoshop today and merged them. I ended up with a file with 21662 x 2824 pixels with 72 dpi. I believe that I can increase the DPI with a diffenrent camera setting. File size is just over 17Mb. Big file hey!!!!

Off to the splashback mob tomorrow to see what they say.

Not a bad view out the front is it. We get about 80% of that becuase of neighbours tree growth. I climbed higher.

Thanks guys

4 weeks and one day!!!

The result is here:

Stop bragging. We have thought of moving to the coast. But to stay reasonably close to the kids and hospital it is darn chockers with those Canberrians!!

We hung out for this block for the view. Two people before put down deposits and then pulled out. Mugs