How to make a Life Poster
Thursday, January 27, 2005
IMPORTANT UPDATE
Since I posted these instructions in 2005 iPhoto has changed and it seems these steps no longer work. The good news is since posting this in 2005 there has been a special application written just for creating Life Posters, its called Posterino. It integrates with iPhoto but is a lot easier to use than the iPhoto hack. It allows you to rearrange and crop photos nondestructively and pick different themes. I used it for the last life poster I created and I'd highly recommend it. Check it out here.
OLD POST…
After posting photos of my apartment a couple weeks ago I got tons of people asking how I made my "Life Poster" seen in this photo. Here are my instructions to create one in about 20-30 min for about $29. Good Luck!
THE INSTRUCTIONS
Step 1. Make a new iPhoto Album. Fill it with the 98 photos you want in your poster. Try to pick photos with lots of different colors. If you pick all indoor florescent light photos your poster is going to look like crap.
Step 2. Crop all the photos landscape with the crop tool constrained to "4 x 3 (DVD)". While you are in edit mode make sure to use the new "Adjust" dashboard built into iPhoto 5 to give your photos great color and contrast.
Step 3. Go the the "File" menu and select "Page Setup...". Click the "Settings" popup and select "Custom Paper Size". Click the "New" button and then name this paper size "Life Poster". Set the paper height as 30", the width as 20" and change the top and bottom margins to 0 leaving the left and right at 0.25 then click "OK".
Step 4. Go to the "File" menu and select "Print.." Click the "Style" popup and select "Contact Sheet". Set the "Across" slider at 7 and make sure to check the "Save paper" box. Now, instated of clicking print, click "Save As PDF...". Saving will take a few minutes since it is saving out 98 full sized photos.
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".
Step 6. Find the TIFF file you just saved and import it into iPhoto by dragging it onto the window.
Step 7. Select the poster file you just imported and the click "Order Prints" from the action bar at the bottom of the window. Add one 20x30 print to you order and then click "Buy Now".
That is it. You poster will be at your house in a few days. :)
BTW: These are great gifts. In addition to the one I made for my apartment I have also made one for my mom and grandma for their birthdays. So if you are short of ideas and need to get someone a cool gift I promise you this is a good bet.
UPDATE: I thought I would also share this little twist I put on the poster I made for my grandma. I took a panoramic photo of her house and filled the top row with it. It looked pretty cool.
244 Comments:
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.
Great idea --- I've just ordered iLife 5 a couple of days ago and look forward to trying this when it comes!
Andy
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
Instead of having to open the file in Photoshop and convert to Tiff just to send to an online source like Kodak, you can just burn the PDF to CD and bring it to any local printshop to get printed in poster size. That way you also have other options, like larger sizes, gloss or matte paper, paper thickness, etc. And it ends up usually being cheaper too!
http://ByA7.comA7
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 ?
I love this! I started working on mine yesterday and just about have it done. I just have to find a way to use Photoshop 7.
To answer a couple questions, the DPI needs to be at least 200 because if you try this at 72, your prints will not be anywhere near as smooth and will most likely have lots of pixelation. It also makes the image 4000 by 6000 pixels in size.
You can also use a PC to make these, but as the entry said, you need Photoshop CS. There may be other ways to do this with a PC if you read through the comments. The montage tool with ImageMagick might be worth looking at too. Here's a URL: Montage manualDan - my blog
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!
A very nice idea. What kind of spacing between the individual photos would you recommend?
Dave Cardwell.
http://www.davecardwell.co.uk/
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.
I do it, with iPhoto 4, and it really takes the 98 pictures.
Once you make the custom paper, be sure that you select it as the paper!
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
Ditto on problem...
Anand Vitt Patel
www.patela.com
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.
Wow, that's a great write up!
I hope someone can transpose this guide for PC users, especially those who don't have Photoshop. Perhaps Gimp users? :)
Thanks!
- Bryan
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.