Capturing and printing large art: what software?

deudeu · 07-16-2008, 04:42 PM

A friend of mine is a painter and he would like to take pictures of his work with as much accuracy as possible. Then he would like to be able to print 100% scaled pictures of those paintings.
The problem is that his paintings are large. By large I mean about 8 by 7. This is feet we are talking about here.

So, even though a 10 Mp sensor can pull out some pretty big prints, I don't think that one pictures would be enough to record all the details of the brushwork.
So I was thinking that a picture stitching program could be used. Do you guys know of a good free or cheap one?

Also, he would like to print pictures of those paintings. But, since he is a starving artist, he can't really print a 8x7 feet picture. So I was wondering if there was some software out there that would take a very large tiff file (from the stitched up photos) and split it up into smaller files.
He could then print a bunch of small 4x6 and put them together!

I guess it sounds silly to stitch up pictures and then take them apart but i feel like it is the only way to get a clean end-result.

Thank you for your help!

*keithlester* · 07-17-2008, 01:28 AM

Originally Posted by deudeu

A friend of mine is a painter and he would like to take pictures of his work with as much accuracy as possible. Then he would like to be able to print 100% scaled pictures of those paintings.
The problem is that his paintings are large. By large I mean about 8 by 7. This is feet we are talking about here.

So, even though a 10 Mp sensor can pull out some pretty big prints, I don't think that one pictures would be enough to record all the details of the brushwork.
So I was thinking that a picture stitching program could be used. Do you guys know of a good free or cheap one?

Also, he would like to print pictures of those paintings. But, since he is a starving artist, he can't really print a 8x7 feet picture. So I was wondering if there was some software out there that would take a very large tiff file (from the stitched up photos) and split it up into smaller files.
He could then print a bunch of small 4x6 and put them together!

I guess it sounds silly to stitch up pictures and then take them apart but i feel like it is the only way to get a clean end-result.

Thank you for your help!

Add a letter L to your siggy
DELUDE U
cos that's what is happening here
or a poor troll
just my £0.02p, you may choose to take this seriously

*KungPOW* · 07-17-2008, 02:05 AM

This might be what you are looking for:

The Sect of Homokaasu - The Rasterbator

I have not used it, but it does allow you to print a number of tiles that can be placed to gether to form a large image.

I read an article a while back about a museum that was recording tapestries through photography. They used a digital camera, and stiched a couple hundred photos together with panographic type software.

Good luck.

deudeu · 07-18-2008, 03:25 PM

Originally Posted by keithlester

Add a letter L to your siggy
DELUDE U
cos that's what is happening here
or a poor troll
just my £0.02p, you may choose to take this seriously

Thanks for your help!

CJSpangler · 07-18-2008, 04:20 PM

let us know if you have any sucess with this as it might be note worthy.

*gokenin* · 07-19-2008, 08:58 PM

I dont know about the ability to break it down to smaller pictures but I saw this on the web and it might intrest you its a guy that does large picture stitching his site offers some info about making large print as well
http://www.maxlyons.net/

*Wombat* · 07-20-2008, 05:40 AM

This may be off the mark, but years ago an architect friend of mine used to use a projector to throw a photographic image from a negative onto a blank wall which had been coated with light-sensitive chemicals. He then used some other chemical to "develop" the image. Sorry I don't know what the chemicals were - should be easy enough to find out - but your friend could maybe do something like that onto a large sheet of paper, cardboard or whatever.
Good luck.