Mike Matas Blog

It never occurred to me to use iPhoto as a printing service for anything besides strait photos....

That is awesome! Thanks so much for the instructions. Going to make one tonight! THANKS SOOOO MUCH for the response!

Sweet! I'm going to try that. A cool technique would be allowing some photos to "break the grid" a little bit by occupying 2 or 4 times the regular space of the other photos. So they would still fit inside the grid, but just take up a little more space. That would add visual interest.

Is there a work around for those who do not have Photoshop?

This is fantastic. So much better than having to go to Kinko's.

and so as not to be anonymous
http://restiffbard.com/

Wow. I've seen this done by hand, but it looks nowhere near as good as yours!

Oh, to have a Mac.

;)

You don't need a Mac. PC users with Photoshop CS can make their own custom-size contact sheet as well.

Fantastic idea... only one problem, I'm in the UK and the Kodak print service from iPhoto doesn't offer poster size prints. 12 x 8" is the biggest that they do.

Nothing stopping me using another online printing service, does anyone know of a UK based online printing service that does poster sizes?

Answered my own question... found an excellent site in the uk for printing poster sizes. www.snapfish.co.uk

Will give it a try and let you know.

That was a great tutorial. I'm guessing the workaround for those of us who don't have photoshop is GraphicConverter. Anybody know for sure?

Yeah, if you do not have photoshop you can use anything that will let you export PDF's and set the DIP. I tried using preview but it only would let me export at 72 DPI and that is not high enough.

Glad people are excited about making these. Email me a shot of you poster when you are done! michael_m@mac.com

That's hands down the coolest thing I've seen all week. Thanks for sharing.

Very cool. I'll try this out. Not sure if you're aware of this but you are the most popular link on del.icio.us today.

Thanks for the instructions. Definitely a great idea.

Thanks for the author's generous share to allow me to translate this great article into Chinese. I do appreciate it! The translated Chinese version is here:

http://www.oikos.com.tw/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=33322&forum=2

Thanks again.

Thanks for the great idea! Now I need more wall space ;)

This would work great with themes or better yet have the photos make an overall pattern or picture, like the quilt concept, or the famous photo technique where the computer samples the contrasts in the pictures and makes them create one larger photo.

I have Photoshop CS but for those without Photoshop or iPhoto, I'm experimenting to see if this is doable with Picasa. I know they already have a grid feature and the the snapshot collage feature so...

Poster: Jackdaw
Website: http://www.creationrobot.com

Great idea, now why didn't I think of this already. Well done Mike. I'm going to start this one now ...

Cool-o-matic, Michael!!!

Hey, where are pictures of Heather, April, and Wendy? Congratulations on the success of Delicious Monster! Send us some t-shirts!

Aunt Bonnie

Thanks for the great idea - done a poster for myself now - looks wonderful!

I read the delicious.monster blog for about 15 minutes before I could figure out what the product was, what it does, and where I could get it. I appreciate that you're not hard selling it, and I am no booster of pushy capitalism, but maybe you could foreground that info. Interesting blog, anyway!

THIS IS SWEET...GOT TO GO MAKE PEE PEE NOW....



Anand Vit Patel
http://www.patela.com

awesome, thanks a lot mike :P

Anyone tried making a mosaic and blowing it up poster-size? Here's Mac software that takes all your snapshots and tries to use them to blur together and create another image (you know, like pop art).

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16250

Insanely great...

I just got my first digicam a couple of months ago, and living in Canada during November-February makes for some pretty dark and dingy photos (depends on the person, though). I'm going to Italy and Greece in a couple of weeks, so I'll be sure to get some really neat shots (The Colisseum, The Vatican, etc.) Looking through my current iPhoto library didn't equate to the most stunning poster!

Thanks again. This is gonna be an amazing gift for people...

Now why didn't I think of that?

I know...because YOU"RE FREAKIN' BRILLIANT!

Thanks so much...this is a great tip.

Very nicely done. I do something similar with a piece of shareware called MacOSaiX, which makes mosaics. You know, picture in a picture, but you can adapt it to be just a poster maker. It uses hexagons, rectangles or puzzle pieces. Anyway, I've used it to make gigantic Xmas 20x30" poster gifts, using iPhoto to send to Kodak's printing service. It's quite brilliant if you have several thousand photos to draw from. But for a poster like Mike's, you only need 98.

If you don't want to spend the 20+ bucks to have it professionally printed and you know how to use scissors, you could use Poster Print...

http://luxor.flieger.de/en/software/posterprint/

Congrats on being featured on Apple's Hot News! They must be very happy that you're promoting sales of the largest print in the iPhoto Print Service!

I use montage from the imagemagick suite of programs for doing this sort of thing.
I also use it as starting point to generate multiple page books of pictures and making a pdf for printing at lulu. So you could make a life book. ( the last 52 page book i had cost approx $15 a piece )

Nicely done. Any idea what you could do differently for those that don't have the full photoshop to do what you did there at the end? My sister in law doesn't have a lot of software of that level.

Would Elements work? That might have come with her new camera.

Ohh, I just love the light grey text on a white background. It's sooo easy to read.

Asshat.

That's really something. I can't wait to try it out myself.

why do you have to make it into a tiff?

Just one more reason to hate the fact that you can't order prints or books in Australia... :(

They would print upside down, anyways :-)

Nice work! A truly great idea. I do have one question, though? I followed your steps and seem to have everything in order. However, when I attempt to save the contact sheet to pdf, it is creating 2 pages: the first has 11 rows of 7; the second, 3 rows of 7. I have doublechecked the custom paper size, and I cropped all of the photos to 4X3 (DVD). What could be going wrong?

Curious:

Is there a specific reason to set it at 200 DPI?

Or would any DPI work? What should be the minimum?

:)

nice
Any tips on how to do something similar with a PC and not a Mac ?

Did anyone ever find a program that can increase the DPI to 200 without having to spend a fortune on a program like photoshop?

you can download a tryout of photoshop at adobe.com, thats 30 days of free poster making :)

You can use GraphicConverter for the required output in 200dpi.

1. From the file menu choose Convert & Modify. Set source file and destination directory.
2. Click edit batches. Pick resolution from the left column 'possible functions'
3. Add resolution to the batch table at the right.
4. Set the resolution to 200dpi in horizontal and vertical fields.
5. Click OK.
6. You will return to the Convert & Modify window. Verify the Function button (it should read 'convert'). Don't forget to set the destination format to TIFF.
7. Click go.
8. Your file is ready!

(BTW: sorry for my grammar/spelling! I am not English.)

Arjen.

Looks wonderful! What program did you use to make the panorama? I have not had great luck with OSX panorama programs.
Cheers, Brand

Very fun. I'm up to 61 pictures so far... thanks for sharing.

I am having the same problem about it printing on two pages... has anyone figured this out yet?

this is most likely the best news for bipolar photo junkies without the requisite wall space for individual photos. brilliant idea.

If Apple doesn't add a specific iPhoto function for this soon, there might be an Automator workflow that would do quite nicely. Aside from cropping all of the photos, I think the rest of this could be automated.

iPhoto + 29 $ only... Do you means you got an illegal warez Photoshop version or that there is a new Photoshop "free edition" i didn't heard about ?

;-)

Sebastien

Great idea - how did you put in the panoramic? how many were those stitched together in that panoramic of ur grandmas? im gonna have fun with this, i can tell... especially being a digital shutter-bug!
Thanks!
Nick
Tallahasse, Florida

You're very creative, Mike. I started building my life poster last night, and happily found out my brother in art-school could get 20 by 30 prints for half the price iPhoto/ Kodak charges. :-)

My PDF keeps defaulting to two 8 1/2 x 11 pages even though I've created the 20" x 30" Life Poster custom paper size. I noticed someone else was having that problem. Any solutions yet?

To the couple people having trouble getting the paper size to 'stick'.

I had the same problem if I followed the howto literally. What I eventually did was go _back_ into 'page setup' and selecting 'Life Poster' under 'Paper Size' instead of fiddling under 'Page Attibutes' and 'Custom Page Size'. It seems like doing the same thing twice, but it seems to work.

this is so cool...

now, i can't wait to get hold of the new ilife5!!!

thanks!!!

dindin
www.dinsworld.com

Can anyone explain in newbie-ish detail how I would go about doing this with just Photoshop CS, I'm working against the clock here!

way cool. i gotta try that.

How do you constrain the crop tool to 4x3?

Groovy!

Please Help! Can Anyone give a quick Tutorial on how to make this Life Poster on a PC using Photoshop! This is one of the greatest ideas and I really would like to know how to do it without the use of a MAC. Thanks so much!

Thanks, Al. Your page setup tip allowed me to select the 20 x 30. Now my only problem is I can't get 98 photos on one page. It creates a 2-page PDF with 7 photos kicked to the second page. It may be a cropping problem, because my rows don't line up perfectly.

Thanks for sharing such an invaluable how-to, I just love the concept!

Quick and dirty Photoshop CS Instructions.

1. Prepare photos - I used 105 shots thats 7 * 15 which seemed to work best for me. Make sure that they are all in landscape and COPY them into an empty folder.

2. OPen Photoshop CS.

Quick and dirty instructions for photoshop CS

1. Harvest photos - copy 105 into an empty folder 105 seems to work best for me thats a 7 * 15 grid.

2. Open photoshop CS

File -> Automate -> Contact Sheet II

3. You now have the dialog that you need

For source images - browse to the folder where you copied the photos in step 1

For Document - 20 inches wide, 30 inches high, resolution of 300 pixels/inch

Mode RGB colour

Select Flatten All Layers

For Thumbnails

Select across first

select Auto spacing
Columns = 7
Rows = 15

Clear all remaining selections in dialog

Press OK
Sit back and watch the fun.

Hope this helps!!!

anyone have an issue where the photoshop file has a transparent margin on the left and right, and on the bottom, but the pictures are flush against the top of the image? followed directions 3 time to a T, no other outcome, through photoshop and the converter with mac. . . wondering if anyone's gone through with is like that and if it produced an aligned, centered poster. . . any insight would be good, experience?

-ian

ofoto.com ships internationally and it is what iPhoto uses anyways (i think).

Great idea, Mike - I did one for myself but it still looks rather funny on the A4 testprint. Nice inspiration!

// Markus

GJ, looks very nice. Now my questions ;-))

1. How did you fill the first row with panoramic photo (Photoshop or iPhoto)
2. Your grandmas poster has fewer photos than 98, which steps are changing in your instructions.
3. Which software do you use to make panoramic photos?

Thx a lot

Mike -
Thanks so much for the info on this!
1) I read about it on Monday at work...
2) Imported the requisite photos to iPhoto (I had been using Canon's proprietary ImageBrowser software, but now I think I'll switch to iPhoto permanently!) and created my mosaic Monday night...
3) Performed all my pdf creation/tiff translation yesterday (took forever with my 800mHz iBook w/only 256MB ram, I'll need to bump up my ram, I think)...
4) Placed my order late last night...
5) And my order was updated as "Shipped" this morning!

Can't wait to get my hands on the results. Thanks again. I'd love to see Apple integrate this feature in iPhoto more easily. (Though it wasn't *that* hard!)

Congratulations Mike for being chosen as a Apple headline story! I have had great results getting posters printed at my local print shop from CD. (You can burn the PDF file to a CD) If you are particular about the type of paper, finish, etc. a print shop is the way to go. You will get to see the print before you pay. Plus with a local print shop you are helping your local economy.

Take care,

Jerry
http://menshi.myftp.org

Mike,

Thank you so much! I created my (first) poster last night of 2004 photos of my kids. I can hardly wait for it to arrive in the mail!

I used iPhoto4 and Photoshop Elements 2 and everything worked in accordance with your directions. The only suggestion I have is to open Photoshop Elements and then drag the pdf file onto the Elements icon in the dock to open the pdf file....that brought up the rasterizing window but trying to open it didn't for some reason.

Thanks again!

Murray

For really big posters, you can use the Rasterbator service: http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/

It's free and won't grow hair on your palms.

Cool, but it looks like you don't need to save the file as a TIFF from photoshop. iPhoto 5 can import the PSD document, so just save it.
Takes a long time though! iPhoto took 30 seconds to print to PDF and PS CS took about 2 mins to rasterize.
(dual 2.5ghz g5, but PS was only using one cpu - tut tut!)

Michael, How did you fill the top row with the panoramic photo? I´m trying to prepare one poster like yours for a present but iphoto puts all the photos at the same size
Thanks!

I am also having the problem with 3 of the rows going to a second page. I can see in Mike's examples that the pictures are closer together.

I am assuming you need iPhoto 5. I am using Ver. 4.

Mike, Great Job! Absolutely one of the coolest uses of iPhoto ever. Did my first one tonight and it came out spectacular! I can gurarantee it is the first of many to come. I had a little overun problem where it was printing the last 14 pictures on the second page on the PDF. Took me a few tries to get it all on one page but success is mine. I loved the Panoramic also of your Grandma's house. What size did you constrain it to?
Thanks for the lesson.
RC

interesting story. When I get back from Iraq I think I'll make one of these for the last 18 months of combat operations. Way cool.

Wow Mike, thank you... that's clever! I'm going to pass the link to my MUG, saludos desde Mexico!

I believe you can also open the PDF in Preview and Export to TIFF from there, if you would like to avoid using Photoshop.

I am seeing the same issue(?) as a previous poster. The rasterized image in Photoshop Elements 2.0 has no margin at the top. The left and right sides both have the specified .25" margin. The top has zero margin, but the bottom has about a .5" margin. I wonder if this is due to a limitation in the printer driver?

Same problem here with no margin on top. The only alternative i could find was to change the Life Poster document set-up to have a top margin of .25" but this still did not center it.

Anyone have a work-around or explaination yet?

It would be a bummer to waste $30 and all the time for an off-center montage.

Thx

Thanks for the awesome idea!!

I put one together last night and ordered my 20x30 print but have a bit of a concern. When the final tiff was completed, it ended up at like 69MB, but when I actually ordered the print, only 8.3MB was transferred. Does this sound right? Sounds like too small of a file to actually print at 20x30 without a lot of pixellation. Does the service compress the file before sending?

Ideas?

Thanks!

DC, Thank you so much or the tip about how to make these on photoshop. Wow it worked perfectly! thank you so much again man.

Wow, it is a great tip (I saw in the Apple site). I will try to make one for my mom birthday!!!

Amazing! I tried it 2 days ago with my local printshop, and it is really cool. 70*50 cm, and only about 12 USD!
Jens/Sweden

Great idea!

I've got the same problem with images spilling over to second page. I've checked and double-checked and they're all 4:3 format. The spacing between the images looks larger than the screenshots. Anyone any ideas?

if you use Preview to save as TIFF, as suggested above, you skip the setting DPI at 200 step. does this impact the final print? I like the idea of skipping Photoshop altogether.

I posted the following comment the other day:

"I am seeing the same issue(?) as a previous poster. The rasterized image in Photoshop Elements 2.0 has no margin at the top. The left and right sides both have the specified .25" margin. The top has zero margin, but the bottom has about a .5" margin. I wonder if this is due to a limitation in the printer driver?"

I have been able to get the image almost exactly centered by setting the top margin to .49" and leaving the bottom margin at 0. Increasing the top margin to .5" results in the last row of images being bumped to a second page. I have not ordered one of these prints yet, so I don't know how this will turn out. However, looking at the margins/rulers in Photoshop, this seems to be the closest I can get to vertically centered.

Actually guys, my poster came back looking absolutely appalling.
http://www.bits.bris.ac.uk/chris/washout.jpg
shows a cut out. On the left is a blurry shot I took with my camera of a section, and on the right is the original.

It is not something I want to give my girlfriend for valentine's day. I'm going to take it to Kinko's and get it done again.

I followed the instructions perfectly and was so proud of myself with the finished result....until my print arrived in the mail this afternoon. About 1.5 inches are cut off on either side. I don't know where I went wrong. When I previewed the image, it looked great. Is this a problem only I have had?

I'm finding that it doesn't work with iPhoto 2.01

(I haven't bought iLife)

In the print panel, it shows a thumbnail preview of the page - the mosaic of images is tiny, and doesn't take up as much space as it should.

If I print, it generates a big ol' PDF. The PDF crashes Preview, and Elements brings it up as being blank, or mostly blank. Acrobat shows nothing.

So this seems to require more recent versions of iPhoto than I have.

People with issues, please read:

I did my first Life Poster right after Mike posted this tutorial. I was one of the people who's TIFF file had no border at the top and I am here to say that when my poster arrived today there is NO BORDER AT THE TOP!

As it is now there really is no way to frame it. I went back into iPhoto and did it several times over with the same result. I finally ended up importing the PDF file into Photoshop and manually taking the time to movie the images down lower in the canvas until it is all nice and center.

After that I took it back into iPhoto and I DID just reorder it. Unlike the person a few posts up, my poster came out beautiful! This kind of thing may have to do with peoples cameras: I am using a Canon PowerShot G2 (4.1 MegaPixel).

So there you have it: no white border in your image... no white border in your print from Apple.

I took the massive pdf result from iphoto to a local print-shop (piedmont/oakland area) and they re-centered it so that the border was even on top and bottom. They even added a little border to the sides. Printed up beautifully. They also offered to do a black background(black between the pictures and for border), which looked great for outdoor shots but was too dark for the indoor shots.. I stuck with the white though) All in all i am quite pleased with the results. Too bad it had to be 'fixed' in photoshop. I know photoshop can do the entire thing by itself, but it is more fun to do in iphoto. Now to frame....

To Poster Above -

How much was it going through a local place over using Apple to print?

It was $13 more out the door, but, i got it the next morning vs. however long apple takes to ship or 'express' ship. I needed it for a birthday and timing was key. I had to call around. Many shops wanted $85!! - whatever. This place charged $80 if you wanted it on canvas though. It was done on lustre (matte) photo paper with some fancy $10k superwide format Epson printer. I paid $39.

Very nice idea and thanks for the detailed tutorial on doing it.

I would also be grateful if someone could post some directions for people wanting to do this with GIMP. Thanks in advance to anyone who decides to help!

-Cards

Wow, great tip. Like many others said before: why hasn't anyone else thought of this before (or posted it before). Great, I will give this a try (with photoshop or something as I do not have an ipod photo). I put a link to your site on my weblog: www.sindono.com

For those who go to print and it wants to place it on two pages, know that Mike accidentally left a step out of his instructions. After you create the custom poster size in page setup, you need to go back to the file menu and select "page setup" again. You'll have Settings: Page Attributes, Format For: Any Printer, and here's the key- Paper Size: Life Poster. Now click OK and print the contact sheet. Cheers!

As I commented before: Great piece! I have put up a little step-by-step howto for people who do not have access to an iPod Photo. I am using Photoshop CS. If you want to, visit: http://weblog.sindono.com/

The tip about selecting the paper size after you have created the "life poster" custom option is important.

Also, when you are printing, step 4 above, make sure there is no yellow hazard warning triangle on your picture (at the top right). This indicates that at least one of the pictures you are using is not high enough resolution to look good. I had to go through the pictures one by one to figure out which one was causing the problem. This is important because it will allow you to print with bad resolution, but it won't look good.

Success! The extra missing step to go back into the File menu sorted my spillover onto second page problem.

Hi,

Thanks for the inspiration! I'm really pleased with mine.

For the benefit of people without Photoshop GraphicConvertor works fine and theres a demo you can download from their site.

I hope you don't mind but I've also started a Life Poster group on Flickr after finding a few of them dotted around. Join up here - http://www.flickr.com/groups/77641449@N00

One last thing. For people in the UK I got my poster printed at Photobox.co.uk, they've got a 40% sale on in Feb and print the 20"x30" measurements. They only print JPEG's but that shouldn't affect the quality to much.

HTH,

Mat

I love this idea and I just got mine back from the printer, Kinko's to be exact. I won't say that I'm disappointed with the turnout, but I'm not as thrilled as I could be. I thought the poster print was going to be like, well, a poster. Instead, it turned out more like when you print a photo on regular printer paper instead of something glossy. I guess it's my fault for not asking about it, but I would highly suggest asking about this wherever you get yours done.

Also, the total cost was $45 out the door ($10 a square foot). If you get glossy, it's $15 a square foot, which would equal about $68. This is all from Kinko's mind you. I'm sure if you shop around, you can do better than that. Or you can just wing it with the Apple/Kodak route, but I had to do mine pretty quickly.

I was wondering, how did the ones from Kodak turn out? Are they glossy at all or are they printed like mine?

I love this idea. I made one right away but instead of ordering a print, used my printer. Here is a link to my little blurp about how I made my Life Poster on a PC. (and how I printed it...)

http://nutmegfizrandommusings.blogspot.com/2005/02/life-poster.html

After my experience today, I would highly advise NEVER using Kinko's to print your poster. Here's why.

1. It's overpriced. Mine was $45 out the door, which is $15 more than the Kodak/Apple route with standard shipping.

2. When I seen the print for the first time, I wasn't that impressed with it, mostly for the paper it was printed on, as I explained above. The whole idea of a Life Poster is great, you just have to be picky with who you print with.

3. Kinko's where I live would not print with .tiff files. They would only do .pdf files. Luckily I put both on the CD when I went there to have it printed, even though the guy on the phone told me they could do it with a .tiff file.

4. And now for the kicker. Kinko's printed my poster with 20.5" X 30.5" paper, even though I specified on the order and on the CD I gave them to print 20X30". Eager to get it into a frame, we made a special trip to the art store to buy a 20X30" frame. Boy was I disappointed when we got home and found out that we were going to have to trim the sides off. The guy at Kinko's said he would reprint it, but we didn't want to go through the hassle. Now the print is slightly crooked, as I am human and not designed for cutting straight, even with a straight line. I did a decent job, but I can still tell that it looks like crap, even in a frame.

Overall, I was not happy with my experience with Kinko's. Somehow going in there I knew this wasn't going to turn out like I thought it would, but I did it anyway. It's almost like every time I go into Wal-Mart. I would suggest that if you aren't pressed for time, use the Apple/Kodak route, or please support your local small business and do some research on some better alternatives to the printing conglomerate Kinko's.

BOYCOTT THEM I SAY!

i just used picassa and it worked great. i selected the photos and did a collage - picture grid. the photo piles are nice as well but do not allow as many photos to be seen.

thanks for the idea !

Inspired by your idea I tried to do something similar with my iTunes cover art, however, iTunes will only print a jewelcase-size mosaic. I'd love to see all my covers in one poster!
Any suggestions?
Robbe

Just a note to all the people who asked about Photoshop. Mike did not use Photoshop. He used iPhoto 5. In step 5 he says take the PDF that you saved in Photoshop...That's a typo He meant take the PDF that you saved in iPhoto. (step 4). iPhoto and all OS X apps save documents in PDF. In other words you do not need Photoshop to make the poster as Mike did. You do however need a Mac with iLife.

I have two frames sitting in the corner waiting for my holiday photos of the Fox Glacier in NZ. Now I know how to fill the second one (the first gets the pano I shot in eight bits with a Nikon 3100!). Sounds like its time to fire up the Epson 10600 - now should I use photolustre or canvas? Great idea and it will be a great gift for my eighty year old mother as well!
Posted by Ian - Brisbane Queensland (but a gumboot wearing NZer by heart). Never had a job that Larry the Laptop (aka 17" Powerbook with 1000mb ram) can't handle yet.

Ok, so for the life poster, when I go to order it, it has the warning that, "LOW RESOULTION MAY RESULT IN POOR PRINT QUALITY" for anything bigger than a wallet sized print. Isn't a 30x20 going to have incredibly bad quality then?

Nice Idea!
But I had one problem. When I first created the album and edited the first photo and had cropped it, I noticed that it also cropped the original photo in my Library. That's not that good!
A workaround is to export the new album first and then import it again as an album. Now it only edits these photos and not the original.
Thanks anyway and take a look at my page :) www.atomtigerzoo.com

Yes, he did use Photoshop. If you carefully read Step 5 it says:
Step 5. Open the PDF file you just saved in Photoshop. When it is opening it will ask you what size you would like to open the PDF at. Set the DPI to 200 and then click "OK". Go to the File menu and click "Save As...", click on the "Format" menu and select TIFF then click "Save".
You saved it as a pdf in iPhoto, then you open that PDF in Photoshop, the dialogue box shown just below step 5 is the exact dialogue box you see when you open it in Photoshop CS. This allows you to set the dpi to 200 and save as TIFF.
I just did mine last night and ordered thru the Kodak Print service, but did not notice if the top had no border as others have noted. I will have to go back and check, I will post back when I recieve my poster.

Thanks for the tutorial. I tried it and the tif file I created looked great, although mine didn't come out nice and centered like yours did.

However, when I got the poster from Apple, I was not very happy with the quality. A lot of the pictures look dark and quite a few of them have a reddish cast. My tif file, however, looks perfect. I went to Apple's discussion forums under iPhoto and have discovered that there are others who have had their images printed through iPhoto and have experienced the same problem. A disappointment to say the least.

That asian girl on the pic (2nd row far to the right on one of the excerpts) is waaay hot. I want to marry her.

Sigh.

My bad. He did say open in Photoshop. But he could open in Graphic Convertor for this step, no?

Or maybe open in Preview and export as Tiff?

I just got my poster from Apple, er Ophoto today and it looks fantastic! I couldn't be happier with the quality. Every picture looks amazing. I can't wait to get home and hang this on my wall. One thing's for sure, this won't be the last poster I make.

Anyone know where the heck one can find frames to fit these posters? I got one for my wife for Val Day with all the kids photos(all 98 kids!).. nah, only two... and it looks great, but have no clue where to get a frame.. Went to target- Nope....

thanks.

brandonentry@aol.com

Mike-

Just wanted to say thanks so much for the instructions. I made my girlfriend a poster for Valentine's day chronicling our four years together. I think it came out great:

http://flickr.com/photos/jcroft/4629625/

Thanks again!

Thanks for this great idea Mike.

I did a poster in iPhoto, discovered that the printer driver was a variable in spacing of photos. The resultant pdf was sent to Photoshop CS and exported as tiff (~40mb), imported into iPhoto and sent to be printed. I was surprised that the resultant upload was only 9mb.

So, I tried another approach. Cropped and enhanced the 98 photos in iPhoto. Dragged them off to a desktop folder. In Photoshop, I created a contact sheet of the folder with the following settings: 20w x 30h, 300 px/in, flatten all layers, 7 columns x 14 rows, using autospacing. Once contact sheet was created, I "filled" the space between with Black. Saved as .jpg at maximum quality. Resulting file was 49mb. Uploaded to Ofoto (Kodak, who prints iPhoto). Ordered a 20x30.

Both posters arrived today. There is a stark difference. The iphoto > Photoshop > iphoto is characterized with washed out color and losts of rasterization, photos along the edge are cut off.

The Photoshop > Ofoto is clear, crisp, printed exactly as laid-out. Simply stunning.

I showed the posters to different people. Universally the first method drew "that's kind of neat" and the second method drew "spectacular."

I attribute the difference to less steps involving translation and sending to a service that didn't compress for sending.

I also did a 84 picture layout at 7 columns x 12 rows that was perfect for 16x20, 8x10, and 4x6.

I had the same issues with floating to a second page. I had the Custom Page set to 30x20 rather than 20x30. Anyway, that did the trick. However, I didn't center it in Photoshop. I just saved out as a TIFF to iPhoto. MISTAKE. My poster has zero border on the top and about .25 margin on the bottom. I did express shipping for V-Day, so I'm stuck with an off-center poster for Monday. Apple did ship it already - ordered this morning. I too wondered about the 10MB. After I surprise my wife on Monday with her Life poster (which includes over 5 hours of scans), I'm going to replace photos she's not crazy about and try the previous poster's method. Check out Ofoto Express - nice Mac application that makes for easy uploading. Ofoto will not accept TIFF's. It's not that hard to find coupons either to help save a few bucks on your print. Excellent, excellent tip. Thanks so much for this. This was my first Life poster and will defnitely not be my last.

Great article! Did you ever explain how you added the panoramic shot to the poster?

AWESOME!!! I'm going to do this for the children's classrooms at my church.

QUESTION: If you don't have PhotoShop, is there another program that will convert the giant PDF to a TIFF that you recommend?

Karl

AWESOME!!! I'm going to do this for the children's classrooms at my church.

QUESTION: If you don't have PhotoShop, is there another program that will convert the giant PDF to a TIFF that you recommend?

Karl

anyone try picasa2? it has a built in feature -create collage-to do this. it even crops the pix. then you can order online

Great idea! Unfortunately, I have the same problem as others have noted; the PDF file extends to 2 pages (11 rows on first page and 3 on the second). Also, I had the first page printed by OFoto and the first and seventh photos in each row are cropped significantly. Any ideas?

Last week, I followed the process (solved the two page output by using the solution noted by others). Placed the order on Tuesday, paid for express shipping, got the poster on Thursday.

I am pretty critical about my printing work but considred this a good first effort. As noted by others, the printer prints with red hue and too dark relative to callibrated colors. I plan to change a couple of my pics and send it back for reprinting. My first poster print is more than enough to help me use photoshop to change to hue to less reds and to lighten the images. Since I am picky, I'll do this with each individual picture where the problems are most noticeable and then do the same to the tiff overall before sending it in. This is typical of what I have to do with regular prints as I use different printing sources.

Criticism aside, this was phenomenal. The quality of my poster is probably as good as most common posters you would buy at a store (as opposed to photo artist produced work which would be better)--the revised one should be great.

Also printed a single image to 20x30 size which allowed a comparison. The hue and darkness problems were very, very minor--suspect the printer is doing an automatic adjustment that is creating a problem for collage. The single print poster was absolutely stunning.

fyi, my original photos were shot with a mix of Canon Digital Elph 4 megapixel and Canon 20D 8 megapixel SLR with moderate quality lens. I edited them all in Photoshop because they were valuable pics of a recent trip to Kenya. No apparent problems with the mix of sources for the photos.

I used Picassa's collage feature and it worked really well. I created 4, 25 picture collages, printed them out, cut them with an exacto knife (took a small part of my finger off in the process -- be careful!), and spray mounted them to foam board. Yeah, it was a bit of a pain compared to having it professionally printed but it was fairly quick and looked good. The downside is getting the four sqaures to line up. Be deliberate with your cuts, go slow and you shouldn't have any problems.

This isn't a bad solution for those of us on PCs and with little in the way of photo software.

EASY AND CHEAP METHOD!

I used the free Picasa2 software to gather 100 images. Then, I used the collage feature to make a grid. You must use a number of photos that can be evenly laid out in a square. In this case it was 10x10=100. I saved the collage as a jpg, which is the only way Picasa allows you to save a collage. I had to revise it a few times. The collage feature will crop the photos into squares. Most of them looked good, but some of them I had to go back and manually crop so that they came out the way I wanted them to. Once I was done, I burned the file onto a CD and took it to Office Max.

The very helpful woman there used Adobe Illustrator to cut the photo into 4 sections. She printed each of them out, taped them together, and laminated the whole thing into one 21.5" x 21.5" poster! Total cost? $5.07!!

For the price, I was very impressed with the quality. Maybe, it wasn't as nice as it would have been using Ofoto and the like. But, my wife absolutely loved it as her Valentine's Day present!

Very cool! Thank you!

=)silvia

I constructed my Life Poster last week and sent it to Apple/Kodak for printing; we'll see how it goes.

However, my question has to do more with file size. My completed poster .tiff was 90 megs in size. When uploaded via iPhoto to Apple, it showed only 9 or so megs uploaded.

I tried to upload to several other services prior to this (usually after exporting the .tiff as a .jpg file), but was rejected at each location. Snapfish and Yorkphoto say 5 megs maximum, which seems awfully skimpy for a 20x30" print. I mean, my 3.2 megapixel camera puts out over a meg a file as it is.

Does anyone know if a service that accepts larger files?

See Tim's post above. Apparently Ofoto accepts 40+mb files at face value.

For anyone using shareware app GraphicConverter in lieu of Photoshop, an alternative to the batch "Convert and Modify" method mentioned above is:

1) Go to Preference / Open / Formats ... and select "PDF"
2) change the default resolution to 200 or 300 dpi, click "OK"
3) Do an ordinary "File / Open" of the pdf you saved in iPhoto
4) Use "Save As ..." and select TIFF
5) done! Now import the TIFF back into iPhoto as described in the original instructions above

Hi, did use your method and it's giving an excellent result.
For those in Paris: three hours printing service (Photoservice) for 14 Euros. Format 50x75cm. High paper quality!

Thanks for hint and clear explanation.

For those on Mac OS without access to Photoshop, try GraphicConverter:

http://www.lemkesoft.de/en/graphcon.htm

I followed Mike's instructions through iPhoto and then opened the PDF with GraphicConverter instead and saved as a TIF. Haven't printed it yet.

PS On my powerbook 1.25ghz, 512RAM, iPhoto 4, the PDF creation took a good 4-6 minutes.

PPS Thanks Mike for this real cool tutorial. Think of all the money you are making for Apple's iPhoto print business!

Did anyone find a way to solve the top/bottom margin problems? I moved things around in photoshop but what happens if you set th margins at 0.5 when you make your new paper?

What camera do you have your photos are amazing, so vivid and vibrant?

Hello,

I want to create a Life poster for my daughter's preschool class.

I tried to export the photos into PDF from iPhoto 5. It crashed each time. Tried to delete the PLIST and removed the caches. No luck.

So, I tried it at work with iPhoto 4. Same problem!

I wonder why iPhoto crashed when exporting to PDF?

Rene

kkkk

This post has been removed by a blog administrator.

Thaks a bunch this is great! Has anyone figured out what to do to correct the issue with having no border at the top?

Dude that's fantastic.
Hope the printing service will work in AU.

Yes, this is seriously cool. Just got my first lifeposter back from Ofoto all the way to here in New Zealand and I am very impressed with the results. So if you can do it from here, you can do it from anywhere! I used the modified instructions that I found at Arno's blog (http://www.sindono.com/weblog/archives/000105.php) using Photoshop. As Ofoto doesn't accept tifs I saved the file as a high-res JPEG and the quality seems very good. Messed up by having two copies of the same photo :-( but hey...

Paul

http://homepages.paradise.net/nz/hellyer

Well, I've tried this twice so far. I don't know about other people but like a few here I too experienced the too dark too red syndrome. My curiousity is if a black background will fix this. Anyone else know? Anyone else care to elaborate in their too dark too red experiences?

My second experience turned out a little better. I took too much red out, so now it's too blue. But, it is finally just about bright enough, after I brightened it as well.

If you want to do neat random sizes and overlaps, try arranging your images in MS Publisher (mine is the 1998 version).
Start with a blank page, use insert to place images on the page, re-size and move them around by mouse, then set their level by clicking on the icons "bring to front" or "send to back". You can get neat effects by stacking 3 or 4 deep. No fiddling with Layers, but I've not yet figured how to get a Publisher page to poster size.

After correcting the (no) border problem at the top of the image using Photoshop, the life-poster looks great. But when I import the tiff into iPhoto 5.0.1, the picture looks incredibly blurry in browser view -- and appears completely black in edit view. I'm wondering if the file is just too big for iPhoto to handle -- 92 megabytes is a lot. However, if my dual-processor 2.0 GHz PowerMac can't handle it, I don't know what computer can! Anybody else experience this? Can I purchase the poster successfully despite this issue?
-
Scott Russell
Memphis, TN

Hi all. Looking for a good classy display option?

I took my Life Poster to my local poster shop and paid them $37 to have it mounted by Plak-It, which is a Canadian company that dry-mounts prints onto a custom piece of high density press wood, then permanently seals them with a clear vinyl matte laminate.

It looks fabulous and is a lot cheaper and less gaudy than having it framed professionally. You'll need to find a local dealer that uses this service.

Some relevant links:

A quick shot of the corner of my life poster, so you can see the mounting. (Mine's black, but there are an assortment of colors available.)
http://sjaustin.com/lifeposter-plak.html

Plak-It's website (which describes the process in greater depth and has a list of dealers).
http://www.plak-it.com/index.asp

Another "thank you" to Mike for posting this. I've really enjoyed it, and I plan on making more for anniversary and holiday gifts.

Hi All, I'm having trouble with the 98 pictures, when I go to print it say's it will be on 2 pages, I have tried everything, but still 2 pages, I get 7 across, but only 11 rows down. What can I do??

Hi All, I'm having trouble with the 98 pictures, when I go to print it say's it will be on 2 pages, I have tried everything, but still 2 pages, I get 7 across, but only 11 rows down. What can I do??

Hi All, I'm having trouble with the 98 pictures, when I go to print it say's it will be on 2 pages, I have tried everything, but still 2 pages, I get 7 across, but only 11 rows down. What can I do??

Hi All, I'm having trouble with the 98 pictures, when I go to print it say's it will be on 2 pages, I have tried everything, but still 2 pages, I get 7 across, but only 11 rows down. What can I do??

I had the 2 page problem. I solved it by selecting "Page Setup..." from the "File" menu again after step 3, and selecting "Life Poster" in the "Paper Size" popup.

The PDF ended up being 528.8 MB! I'll bet that's because I have no printer selected in the Print dialog box. Converting it to a TIFF (in Photoshop Elements) brought it down to 68.7 MB. And 9.9 MB were transfered in iPhoto when I ordered the poster.

I don't have PhotoShop, but I do own PhotoShop Elements 3.0. If you do, you won't find "Set DPI to 200," but you will find when you open the pdf "Resolution." Resolution is pre-set at "72." Change that to 200, and you're good to go.

Thanks for the great instructions. I just created a poster of my various trips to Europe and States. I can't wait to get it from Apple/Kodak.

Thanks, again.

Ken
Las Vegas, Nevada

possible "too dark & too red" solution...

i made one and the Photoshop file i produced was a TIFF in CMYK colorspace - came back too dark and too red.

re-did and submitted a JPEG in RBG colorspace - came back perfect.

definitely need to use RGB, not CMYK.

How wonderful that I stumbled upon your great tutorial! Perfect for fathers day! I send you thanks from Creativity Cafe: http://creativity.net/.

Aloha,
Peter

I finally got around to trying this out and the results are fantastic! thanks for the tip bro

Hi there from Germany,

obviously it's not possible to order Prints in U.S, Size here via iPhoto or am I wrong? any suggestions what to do?
Than you,
Oliver

Hey i really like these
i supose there has to be a way to make smaller posters which you could use as postcards (cheaper)

I just got my first Life Posters back from the printers and followed Mike's instructions almost verbatim. I did my PDF conversion in Photoshop Elements 2.0 for Mac and upconverted to 300 DPI in RGB colorspace then saved as a TIFF. I sent my prints from iPhoto after importing the TIFF. I ended up with colors that are best described as "wonky". They almost look right, but appear to have a bit of red or magenta applied to them. Some are too dark. So, I'm impressed with the process of making a Life Poster, but Apple's printing service seems to have some issues.

Hi Mike,
I've make my first life poster base on your work! Really great thanks first!
By the way, I wonder how make a life poster just like the one you make for your grandma?
I do want to make a poster just with about 15 pics. Can you share with us on how to make a poster with different pic and different size, like square and regular. THANKS!

You could just sign up for Buzznet...http://buzznet.com as they'll be adding poster printing next week....along with photostream books, etc....and cheaper than iPhoto.

I heard Buzznet was doing that, too. They said the process is totally automated once you make the set you want. I hope it's as cool as this. Great idea!

C'est génial! I thinks I'm gonna spend my last pennies of drinking money just printing life posters. Just I' d like to make rows of 15 at least pictures or change orientation. Do you have another great tip like this?

Cyril http://www.mobipict.com

I can think of so many practical uses for something like this! Birthdays, graduations, mothers/fathers day, etc. We're planning on taking a family vacation at the end of the month and I thought this would be a great way to recap some of the memories from our trip.

google offers picasa software which, besides being an awesome way to file your photos, offers a collage command. you pick what photos you want involved and it does the dirty work, leaving you with a JPEG file of the composite image. it is a little limited though in functions, but does the job for those without macs/photoshop!

hi, this is a good resource for posters. http://www.nowposters.com

If you don't have Photoshop I would suggest using GIMP it is a GPL license. It is free and works almost exactly like photoshop.

Anybody knows how to do a life poster using Paint Sho Pro 8.Thanks!

I just made and ordered my first Life Poster and followed the instructions exactly as describe (don't for get to set print size to Life Poster) and it came out fantastic! Thanx mike!

Great project. My PC method: Used MS Publisher with a PDF print driver ("free" ad-supported PDF995) to "print to file" a large-format (22x36) PDF with margins set to the 20x30 poster size and marked with a thin "border box" (useful later to "crop to size"). Publisher made it easy to work with panoramas, etc, and by using its gridlines, layout was relatively easy. Once printed to PDF, I converted to JPEG at 200 DPI using PDFedit (which came w/ PDF995) and used a photo app to crop the JPEG to the 20x30 boder box. I'm trying two photo services: 1) Snapfish w/ $19.99 posters (but error message said max image upload was 3500 x 3500 pixels, so I had to downsample the file to 2333 x 3500 pixels); 2) Kodak EasyShare Gallery w/ $22.99 posters, which accepted a 200 DPI (4000 x 6000 pixel) upload. Currently await my posters!

Just a quick note, Costco Photo Center will do 20x30 photo posters for $9.99!

http://www.costcophotocenter.com/default/jsp/costco/popups/help_pricing.jsp

You can upload via their site and pickup in-store if you have one near you.

Here is another way to make a life poster using automator. Its a snap and no pjotoshop neededhttp://www.macilife.com/2005/07/how-to-make-life-poster-tiger-edition.html

Has anyone figured out how to make a panoramic picture stretch across the entire top row of the contact sheet? iPhoto puts the entire panoramic in the first cell of the first row.

My "page settings" selection doesn't allow me to go to "settings" and click "custom paper size." What do i do?

I tried to order the print after follwing the instructions step by step but iPhoto doesn't allow me to select the 20"x30" inch format; is it because I'm in Europe (Italy to be precise)?

Thanks,
Ricky

This is excellent stuff. Thanks.

Hi! I blogged your poster information, even tho I have not yet made one myself. I have iphoto 4.1. I am guessing I can use that just fine?
I am having problems now with iphoto. Soon, I will have it back up ( hope) and plan on making a poster for the holidays.
You have a really nice blog, and I was so touched to read about helping your Grandparents getting set up so you could visit them on line. Adios!
...SS

This is awesome instructions.. I must try this at home. Thank You very much

This has great potential and I want to get mine just right...I've been playing with ways to get the panoramic in there. Any suggestions.

I followed the instructions, just as you state, and ordered my poster, it took Apple 3 weeks to send it back, and when I received it they croped 2 inches off each side, so the all the photos down each side were cut in half. so the $28 plus shipping is down the drain... I contacted Apple, and they do not care, and will not refund or give credit.

That is a very cool tip, thanks a lot, I've already made my own poster and it rocks!!!!!!!!!!

hi--

So quick question? do you need iLife'05, or just Tiger

cool

that is so amazing, would love to make one of my nephew

Colin

Thanks for the instructions! I made a life poster for my brother for his college graduation and he loved it.

Is there a way to make a horizontal life poster as well?

This is awesome!

I followed the instructions and ended up with a 200+mb tif file.

I decided to buy the print from Costo as someone else suggested so I had to convert the tif to a jpg. I did it by Exporting it with Preview.

The jpg was less than 3mb so I was worried about the quality.

But I got my poster today and it turned out great!!!

I don't have a Costo near me so I had to have it shipped. It cost $15 shipped. I uploaded them the file on Monday and had my poster on Thursday! :)

Just installed iLife '06 and something ins't right. I can't seem to get the 20x30 sheet to register in the print dialog box. I see it in the page set up, but cna't seem to get the 20x30 custom page size in the print dialog box... HELP!!!!

Yes, boo, it doesn't seem to work in iPhoto 6. Any solutions anyone?

Ok guys, I kind of got it to work with iLife '06.
You can change the "paper handling" in the advanced print options, however, this would only produce a lower res scaled version of the letter format which is not what we're looking for.

Here is the better approach:

iPhoto '06 only allows you to pick a paper size that your selected printer can actually print out. Therefore, you have to add a new printer and chose one that can actually handle larger paper sizes. A good one would be the HP Designjet 800PS. If you added it to your printers and picked it you can magically select form within larger print sizes. Just pick a larger one that has an 3 x 2 aspect ratio or A1 if you're in Europe and you're good. The PDF should have the same high resolution than before.

In Photoshop scale the image to 30" x 20" if you're in the States and voilá!

A nice tutoral ;) Always wanted to make something like this :)

answer to my prayers! thank you!

iPhoto 06 rotates images back onto their sides if you had fixed their orientation.

The iPhoto rotation occured because I did not preset the photos to 4x3 and clicked save paper on the printer setup. So to save paper, the printing engine rotated the images to save space. D'uh.

Hey,
Everything is fine up until the saving to PDF. When i click save to PDF, i keep getting an error message that says "No pages from the document were selected to be printed"..does any one know how i can fix this?

This is a good idea. I've learned that you can do almost he same thing, though, with HP Image Zone, or HP Image Zone Express.

the best way is to add the printer HP DesignJet 800PS to your printer preferences. then you can select sizes from A2 to A0 etc.
and im sure custom sizes would work aswell

I've used these instructions at least four or five times now... Thanks for putting them together!

A great tutorial,

i also love your blog's style.. well done!

This is a great tutorial but if you want to take your life posters to the next level then you've got to check out Posterino. http://zykloid.com/posterino/index.php

It's very easy to use and it gives you lots more flexibility over image size and placement.

WOW! This is incredible, I can't wait to get started on this project! I was just wondering, is there anyway that I could take one photo, and split it up into 98 photos to hang on my wall? I think that would look really cool as well! Please let me know!

Hey I can't get the pictures all on on page I did acsactly what you said but can't get it to work... i get up to 11 row's of pictures... pls help

I do not have photoshop. Though, I do have GIMP. It works really good. Here is what I did:
1. I open up iPhoto 6. Added 91 photos to a folder (since I wanted to add a panoramic at the top).
2. Set all 91 picture to 4" x 3" (w x h).
3. Created a new paper size in Page Setup as mention above.
4. Selected the pictures and click print. Now here is an important thing to note. iPhoto 6 adds the paper size on the Standard Print. It will say Letter (it just won't say Custom or whatever you called it). Just ignore this. Also, you will notice that it says 2 pages. Well, this will cause a problem. So, cancel the print and select only the first 77 pictures (We will come back to pick up that 14 pictures). Now do print and follow his instructions.
5. Select those 14, go to print, and to the save PDF just like before, though, give it a different name.
6. Open the first PDF in GIMP. It will ask what pixel size (200), color, anti-aliasing (Strong), etc. Click Ok.
7. Once open, then open the second PDF with GIMP and set those same settings.
8. Copy those two rows from the second PDF over to the bottom of the first PDF.
9. Add a panoramic picture to the top if you want at this point( you might have to move pictures down).
10. Now save as a Tiff, and import it back into iPhoto.

Have fun.

I need help w/ poster (iphoto 6.0.5)

I tried following the directions listed above, but can't seem to get access to the custom paper size. I go to Page Setup, make the custom size, but then can't seem to choose it when I go to print. It isn't listed. Any ideas???

-chris

Excellent. Thanks for posting this. Very helpful.

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