Is 72dpi high enough for a 3m wide billboard viewed from 8m away?

[Terri Brown]

Hi guys,

 

Just wondering if you think that is a high enough dpi to render out at for a billboard of 3m x 2m, viewed from the street at approx 8m away? That would make it a 8500 x 5600px render. Seems a bit excessive to me

 

Thanks!

Edited January 30, 2018 by terribrown

[bertabob]

Hi guys,

 

Just wondering if you think that is a high enough dpi to render out at for a billboard of 3m x 2m, viewed from the street at approx 8m away? That would make it a 8500 x 5600px render. Seems a bit excessive to me

 

Thanks!

 

Are you in contact with thebillboard company who will produce it?

They usually can provide with a PS or InDesign template or tell you the requirement incl. which color profile you should choose and also the dpi.

As i can see, for certain type of artwork 30 dpi should be enough, i'm not sure about renderings if it makes a difference compared to a photo.

 

 

https://kallai.net

[RyderSK]

The DPI doesn't have to correlate to actual image resolution.

 

For 8 meters away, you may literally upscale 1920px wide image and it will look crisp :- ).

 

But if you do want to keep up with the DPI=PPI logic, just upscale the image in post. https://letsenhance.io/boost is fantastic, it does 4x upsampling, so just downsample using bicubic back to desired resolution afterwards.

[Terri Brown]

Thanks Eszter. Unfortunately (as is usually the case), I am not dealing with the client directly, and the middle man can't always source that kind of information. Also, it is difficult for me to ascertain that in Johannesburg as my client is in France, and the specs there may differ. I have called billboard companies here before, and the one guy told me to render out at 300dpi...needless to say I didn't take him too seriously.

[Terri Brown]

The DPI doesn't have to correlate to actual image resolution.

 

For 8 meters away, you may literally upscale 1920px wide image and it will look crisp :- ).

 

But if you do want to keep up with the DPI=PPI logic, just upscale the image in post. https://letsenhance.io/boost is fantastic, it does 4x upsampling, so just downsample using bicubic back to desired resolution afterwards.

 

Thanks Juraj,

 

At 1920px that would be 16 dpi. I read somewhere that approx 18dpi is ok for billboards...but for me it's all about viewing distance. If you think it's viable from 8m I'll take your word for it (experience noted).

 

So just to be moronically safe, if I rendered out at 3000px wide and upscaled 3 times with Lets Enhance to 9000px wide it would look great? I've never used Let's Enhance before. 3000px is possible with this timeframe.

[RyderSK]

You might be surprised at the results :- ) It's still hit&miss sometimes but I've been getting fantastic results upscaling some older textures. I even tried upscaling 2k render and comparing it to my native 8k render and it was impressive. It's definitely good enough for watching from distance.

 

To be honest, you shouldn't need to do any upscaling and sending 3k image is fine, parity in DPI/PPI is beneficial for vector graphics and typography which will render at their sharpest but I understand that when dealing with ignorant print shop or client it's better to be safe and just bake-down the raster image into giant file size for peace of mind.

 

Just note about letsenhance, it has limit on file size mostly, so after you have done your post-production just upload a jpeg. I personally like the "magic" option which hallucinates new detail.

 

You can test it in meantime on any render you have on hand so you don't trust it blindly. If it won't give you sufficient result you may just upscale your image using regular bicubic in Photoshop.

(Latest Photoshop CC update provided partly AI-enhanced upscaling too, it has to be turned on in settings and then selected as correct method in upscaling).

Edited January 30, 2018 by RyderSK

[Terri Brown]

Awesome. Thank you Juraj, that really helps a lot.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Printers always ask for 300DPI because someone else told them that any bitmap image will print at it sharpness at that resolution, but in reality, it does not matter, if your render has at the final print size it should be fine.

 

Open the print assistant in 3D Max and place your final size in meter or inches, then select your dpi (dots per inches) and it will give you pixels.

 

8M at 300 DPI it is an insane size and is just waste of time, as Juraj mentioned, the printer just wants to be sure he does not get the blame if someone complains about how blurry the image is.

 

8K pixels is on the large size for a rendering but it is doable if you can use DR.

 

Another method I followed for a while was to render 1/4 of the final size of the image at 300 DPI then upscale in photoshop. But comparing printed images with that method and other at 75 dpi but at the final print size, they look just the same.

 

Upscaling software work fine most of the time, but if you have fine detail those are the first to get softer so depending on your image will be the results you get.

 

best luck.

[dvdarchitecturerenderings]

I can only second this.

72dpi is definitelly enough, but I still suggest to upscale it with photoshop to 150 or even 300dpi this way there wont be any pixels visible when you look closely and it only takes 2 seconds to do. We tried this at a printshop once because a client didnt quite believe it. We rendered at 72dpi and increased it to 150 dpi and then printed a test run. Even at a close viewing distance of 1 meter or so the image looked nice and crisp.