What printing suggestions do you have for printing maps as art?
JulianDracos
Mapmaker
I have seen some people use maps as artwork. I am thinking, well I can just print some of my maps and put them on the wall. The problem is, I am not sure what options I should use for printing.
Since I would want this to be bigger than a sheet of paper, I would likely use some a company to print it. However, I am not sure what options to use. That is, what type of paper should I select? What color of paper is best, e.g. should I use certain color paper for parchment? Should it be glossy or matte? Should I have it bleed out to the edge or a white border?
Any thoughts on what options I should try using?
Comments
I would talk to the printer and ask to see some samples. Any printer worth the money will have a set of the same image printed on different media.
For your part, I would make sure that you aren't about to print anything that is too enlarged for it's own good. For example, a lovely bitmap mountain symbol might look fantastic on your screen, even a pretty big screen, but if you print it ten times the size on a piece of paper it will look fuzzy, or pixelated, because there is always a limit as to how large you can print a bitmap fill or a bitmap symbol. A3 and sharp is better on your wall in a nice frame, than A2 and all blurry and pixelated.
Hmm. I thought CC3 allowed for nearly infinite scale (hence better than photoshop) so I never thought of anything being too big or too small. Is this a common issue with printed maps made from CC3? If I make the map large to begin with and export at high dpi, will that mitigate the pixelization?
While CC3+ itself allows for almost infinite scaling, the symbols and fills themselves are still ordinary raster images (To get the most out of the infinite scaling, you would need to use vector artwork instead of raster, but generally that's not as pretty, and while they scales indefinitely so you avoid pixelation, they aren't detailed enough to really look good when enlarged too much). The raster images provided in much higher quality than you would ever normally need, thus allowing you to export the map at quite a high resolution, but there are limits. Try opening up one of the .png images (you'll want top open up the _VH version of the file) from CC3+'s symbol folder in your favorite image editor, and zoom into it, and you'll notice that you can make it quite big before pixelation becomes an issue.
If I make the map large to begin with and export at high dpi, will that mitigate the pixelization?
No. The pixelation is a limit of the resolution of the artwork, so the only thing that really affects that is how large (physical size) you make the final output, there are no way to cheat in CC3+ to affect this, it can't make the images better than they are.
At this size it looks good - nice and clear, no fuzzy bits or problems.
And this is quite large - large enough to print the map so that the mountain is maybe 2 inches tall in itself within the map and it would still look fine.
but if you blow the entire map up to wall size with 6 inch high mountain symbols you will be able to see the jagged edges of the lines, which are the pixels of the original bitmap image.
So it is better to print the smaller version nice and pin sharp so your friends can get their noses right up to the map and still be really impressed, rather than them having to stand back a bit so that the pixels aren't quite as noticeable.
As Remy explained above, this is a problem with all map graphics that are bitmap based, whether they are CC3 bitmap symbols, or PS symbols. All bitmap artwork is the same, and you can't get away from it.
The best way to tell if you will get pixelation if you blow your map up to the size you want to blow it up to is to print a smaller section of the map on your home printer at the same scale as you would print the whole thing on the bigger paper. Then you will see if the bitmap symbols and fills look bad.