Some advice needed on a large size graphic

[MarkC-UK]

Hi all. I've offered to design a roller banner for a colleague and I'm struggling with the finished output.

The banner is printed on a polyester film and it's size is 850mm wide and 2150mm tall. The print company recommend a resolution of 150 ppi.

If I start a new session of Paint Shop Pro X(poor mans Photoshop...I know) with a blank background 850mm x 2150mm and 150 ppi my pc goes ape. It locks up, then I get virtual memory warnings etc etc.

My cure for this was to work using the same size canvas but at 50 dpi. All good, my graphics and text look great. Then I resized it to 150 dpi and although very slow, it eventually worked. Great methinks. However, when I go to save as .jpg I get another warning: unable to save, not enough memory blah blah.

Am I missing something here/tackling this the wrong way OR is my computer right; am I out of memory??

I currently run a 3GHz Pentium 4, 512Mb RAM and onboard graphics.

 

Just in case; I've been pricing up some Crucial memory (4 lots of 512Mb) and a 256Mb Radeon 9550 AGP graphics card. Will this improve the situation??

 

Grateful as always.

[Mat@MDI-Digital]

personaly, I would work at 1/2 size at 150dpi (thats about 6000 pixels wide) and blow it up to full size after the image is done.

Now, in Photoshop if you try to save a large file as a Jpg (where talking 10k wide here) then photoshop often runs out of memory, but PS has 3 settings (basline standard/Basline Optimized/Progressive) that are todo with the compression, so when PS trys to save it used memory to compress the file, if the file is large it will bomb. I can normanly save as a jpg if I change these settings, but sence youre not using PS its kinda hard to offer any advice other than that.

 

Although, why not save it as a Tga or a tiff, both formats are totaly fine for printing.

 

My cure for this was to work using the same size canvas but at 50 dpi.

well, if your working at 50dpi then the file pixel size is infact only 30% of final size, I would say this is to small to blow up....personaly

 

Just in case; I've been pricing up some Crucial memory (4 lots of 512Mb) and a 256Mb Radeon 9550 AGP graphics card. Will this improve the

situation??

 

GFX card will make no difference to saving files.. Now extra memory is a total must, im supprised you can do anything with only 512, I would realy recomend you invest in more, and the more the better, I have 3gb on my PS machine.

[MarkC-UK]

Thanks for the advice Matthew; I'll give it a try.

Off topic - Where in Norwich are you??

[Mat@MDI-Digital]

im in Lakenham...aka the killing fields