Help with a wide outback or rainforrest photo

Submitted: Friday, Jul 06, 2012 at 15:19

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PJR (NSW)

I am after a very wide high resolution photo of the Australian bush for a kitchen splash back. A panoramic style would be best. The boss wants a rainforrest scene with heaps of green to go with the slate floor. Me? I want a typical wide photo of the red outback. I will change the slate if needed. Either way the photo has rto be high resolution and a big file size. The bigger the better. The ciurrent design has the splashback length at 4.5 meters. We so much love the bush and would like a bit in the kitchen.

From the splashback mob:
quote "The art guy said the images need to be at least 15mb to make the picture ok when enlarged etc. And higher is better" unquote

Can anyone help?

She does not know I put this up either. So those that know us - HUSH IT.

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Reply By: Member - Graham Watson (SA) - Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 00:47

Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 00:47

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.

Graham Watson

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Follow Up By: PJR (NSW) - Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 09:04

Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 09:04

Thanks for the response Graham.

I wasn't given a pixel size. Just a minimum data size. I do not know enough at this stage how to ask it any other than what I said. Maybe I was too bamboozled to think that far.

However with your hint at 600dpi let me try again.

From an email on this I just learn't that a photo can be flipped horizontally to artificially look more like a panorama instead of a "doubled up" photo. Learning already! So we will not worry too much about the width unless a panorama photo is found.

One step at a time.

The finished height has to be about 600mm. ie 24 inches. With a finished resolution of a minimum of 200 dpi that means the "part" of the photo that is used has to have at least 24 x 200 pixels vertically. = 4800 pixels. So where do I go now? How from the data sixe (2Mb) how can I tell how many pixels the photo has in it?

The properties shown in Picassa for the photo below shows a pixel depth of 24. That throws me.

Our experiments so far:
So far we have been playing with cutting a slice out of a "normal" photo and stretching it. So if I took a "normal" photo and then cut out just the top section of the trees (see photos below) and stretched it to a height of 600mm that would suit the height problem and making several copies and "flipping" horizontally every second one we could get a wall full of ferns. But I cannot "see" what it would be like. My "non graphic" logical mind cannot see if it would be suiable. Confusing. You betchya.

We have a Canon EOS550 now and maybe we can take one ourselves.

I am way open to any information.

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Follow Up By: Member - Graham Watson (SA) - Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 11:14

Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 11:14

For a photo file (jpeg etc) on a PC if you go to properties and then the details tab it will give you the size of the image in pixels. Bit depth refers to the number of colours each pixel can be. 24 bit colour is over 16 million colours, which is finer than the human eye can discern (about 10 million colours) so is called true colour.
I use Adobe Photoshop elements to stitch several overlapping shots together to create a panorama. I use version 6 but version 10 is what is currently being sold for about $150 at JB Hi-fi. The results I have achieved are not perfect,but you need to look really closely to find the mismatches.
As mentioned elsewhere you do not need a normal photo resolution of 300DPI for something like a splashback which you will be viewing casually from a distance, but I am not sure what the best resolution they would use for printing the splashback.

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Follow Up By: PJR (NSW) - Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 13:07

Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 13:07

All the graphics work will be done by the manufacturer. We just need to come up with the photo. Or photos as required.

Thanks about the colour depth. We do not have photoshop.

Resolution. We will work it out with them later. But 200 to 300 apprears about the right one.

Thanks

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Reply By: GrumpyOldFart - Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 08:57

Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 08:57

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

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Follow Up By: PJR (NSW) - Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 09:17

Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 09:17

Dru

That sound like the first drop of rain to the drought stricken farmer.

Graham just gave me a bunch to think about as well. Now I have pixels bouncing around and confusing me.

The boss would prefer the green gentler colours of the rain forrest. Personally I have preferance for the desert.

The kitchen will not be done until around September and the splashback does not have to be done at the same time. In fact they prefer after the rest is finished so that it is not damaged by the heavier handed carpenters etc.

I believe that my wife likes the one just before the "circles" in the link below. Scroll right and you will see the rainforrest. My preference is the header from exploroz that is shown below.

Anything Dru.

Impression series splashbacks

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Follow Up By: Member - John and Val - Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 12:25

Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 12:25

Phil,

Had a look at the image your good lady likes. It raises another issue. Lovely photo, but it needs height and would suffer badly if reduced to match your aspect ratio - 600x4500 mm will require a very special picture. Wonder if several smaller splashbacks might be an option - one for the stove, one for the sink, one for the work area?? Panorama is possible as others have suggested, and Dru's offer is a beauty, but that aspect ratio does limit your options.

Cheers

John

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Follow Up By: PJR (NSW) - Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 13:32

Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 13:32

Another option John.

But you never know what we have among the exploroz fratenity.

Just a plain old landscape from our camer gives us 5184 width and 3456 in height in landscape mode. Forgetting about the horizontal for the moment, the 3456 at 150DPI gives a height of around 585 mm which may be okay for what we want. Especially a dense undergrowth of ferns as in the Daintree.

Doubling may then get the overall width that we need.

Update on size. If I get another 1.5 meter window the kitchen may not be as wide. We have finished visiting the second kitchen designer and it may be down to 3 meters.

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Reply By: Member - Cruiser74 - Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 10:56

Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 10:56

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

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Follow Up By: PJR (NSW) - Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 13:46

Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 13:46

Craig

A wealth of info there. I had an inkling the we should go there but you laid it out nicely. Yes we have a tripod. I was thinking of that at around 2AM.

I played with making up a panorama once as a lad with an old camera but too too many "big" and landscape photos but that was years ago when surfing. As expected it was failed. You have given us hope.

We need a few Barrington Tops or Yilba Tilba drives.

We are off to the Simpson soon and will have a heap of opportunities to get desert photos. Isn't it a shame we didn't have the 550 when up on the Cape and visiting the Daintree. Just imagine a reproduction of Fruitbat Falls on the wall. Maybe a dtrip back is needed. There are places that are closer. We have time on our side as well.

Thanks mate

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Follow Up By: PJR (NSW) - Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 15:13

Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 15:13

Well Craig. What do you think of my very first merging four into one?

Final details are:
Width 11130
Height 2820
Resolution 200 DPI
File: 19.8Mb

Just from the front verandah at the hills across the valley.

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Follow Up By: Member - Cruiser74 - Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 15:24

Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 15:24

Hi, not a bad first effort and you get the idea. You live in a pretty enviable spot there! I can see a fair bit of ghosting in this shot which tells me that you either haven't overlapped your individual shots enough, your tripod was moved or bumped between shots or your camera/tripod set-up was not kept level between shots. It would also be interesting to know what software you are using to stitch your shots together. Don't be frightened to overlap your shots by up to 50% if needed and take double the amount of shots. This makes it easier for the software to stitch the respective images. Without going into too much detail here there is a wealth of information online that can help you out and it can get quite detailed with info about nodal points and such. Start off with the simple stuff and you will be creating some great stitches in no time!

Craig

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Follow Up By: PJR (NSW) - Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 22:50

Saturday, Jul 07, 2012 at 22:50

Craig

The softweare if Arcsoft Photo Studio 2000. It came with some package I purchased just a few (10) years ago. Up until now it has suited our purposes. The stitching is done by identifying a pixel, or area if it is not critical, in each photo, selecting the blend width and let it do the rest. It doen't have many smarts. It does have an excellent rotating and red eye reduction facility. That is about all we used it for. I ended up using 10%. 100% gave big bunches of ghosts and 0% showed an obvious line where they were "just cut and glued".

The latest effort (see below) was taken from the hill at the rear of the house, just above our roof line, looking west over the southern suburbs of Canberra towards the Brindabellas. The far right hand section was deleted by photobucket. The file is now 17104 x 3040 pixels and 30Mb in size. That was the view from our front verandah before all the "domestic" trees grew up. We have about 80% of it now. I did not take the correct tripod so the photos were taken in landscape. But I get the idea and with portrait photos and a better software package it will work. We can take our own. But before I go patting myself on the back I need to get the splashback guru to look at the original source and resultant panorama photos. They would no doubt do a better job. I think this also need the professional touch.

The splices are evident when looked at from a distance so that needs work.

Thanks again.

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Follow Up By: Member - Cruiser74 - Sunday, Jul 08, 2012 at 09:52

Sunday, Jul 08, 2012 at 09:52

Hey that's much better! I would definitely advise getting rid of that ancient software you are using though! There have been ALOT of developments in the last 10 years that make this process more seamless and intuitive. I'm not sure if you are aware but you can download a fully functional trial version of Photoshop (CS6 version has just been released) to use for 30 days. I have included a link to the download and also a link to a short video tutorial on how to use the Photomerge functionality within the software. It is really very easy. The rest of Photoshop is a whole other animal! I have been using it for over 5 years and have barely scratched the surface of its power but for what I need it for (editing landscape images) it is amazing. Best of Luck!

Photoshop CS6

Photomerge tutorial

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