Printing Maps

[Edward II of Kenland]

I printed out my Afenland map by going to the local UPS store and used their large format printer and am pretty disappointed with the results.

Some background: I wanted the poster to be the same size as the map appears on my screen in photoshop when zoomed in 100%. I found out that my screen DPI is actually 93, however in photoshop when I use that DPI and press "Show print size" it always zooms out, this also affects the image as shown in the image settings too, of course. What I found was that photoshop thinks my monitor is at 72 DPI because I set the image to that and i press show print size and it stays 100%. Again, this weird because this makes the image larger than it should be. I used a ruler and it is correct in scale to the screen at 100% when at 93 dpi. Very strange.

Anyway, I set the image to 93 dpi (without resampling) when I printed it.

The results were not good. It came out looking blurry and bad. Please see the following pictures I took of the printed map. I included my finger in them to show a contrast between how blurry the map is compared to my finger.

20200714_211946.jpg 20200716_130018.jpg 20200716_125942.jpg

I don't think the problem is one of 93 DPI. While I am thinking of perhaps just trying again by resampling the image to 300 dpi and hoping that was it, on my digital version as viewed on my phone and my monitor the map looks crisp at 93 dpi. I don't think thats the problem, and I don't want to risk spending $25 dollars on another gamble.

Are UPS's printers just not good quality, or does anyone have any ideas as to why it turned out so badly? If it was just UPS having bad printers does anyone have any recommendations as to where I could print my maps in a high quality? The biggest I need to print is 29" x 32". Thank you to anyone who may help!

[Michi il Disperso]

Well, it's only an impression, but i think the blurring is mostly on the text, and the names of towns; te lines of the river and black line in general seems right to me (i don't know how you seen it on screen). Maybe it's a problem of text rendering? Also don't know how much a printer quality can impact on result, i almost never printed a map.

[Falconius]

I'm sure you can find out what DPI the large scale printer can manage at your UPS store. It would be ideal to match that. Another thing to consider is the file format, UPS suggests PDF to achieve expected results, at my old art school they insisted on TIFF which I think is the standard for printing raster images still. Don't use jpg.

There are some professional printers around the forums.

[Hai-Etlik]

The problem is that your made your map at too low a resolution for print. There is no magic way around this, the information needed (the pixels between the pixels) does not exist.

Resampling is just asking the computer to guess what that missing information should be and that's precisely what the printer did. There are different ways of making those guesses: the printer (or its driver) looks like it used "Nearest Neighbour" which leads to that blocky "pixelated" look. You can do the resampling yourself before hand so you can pick the resampling method that looks least bad but none of them are going to magically create the missing information perfectly. This is especially noticeable for things like text.

If you want a good result, you really have to start with print in mind from the beginning.

[Tiana]

To get a good result, you want 300dpi or more. You'll want to print at a size more like 10x12 if you made it at 92dpi. Your best bet would be to run it through a vectorizer so you can upscale it without losing the resolution as the print result did. It might not make a good text result though. If you set your print size of 29x31 inches at 72dpi, it will not print well at that size, it will be rendered on your screen at that size. You have to set the dpi to higher and basically redo it, or print it smaller, or if the text is with a font, you could remove the text, vectorize the underlying art, scale the art up, and then scale the text up as long as you left the text in editable form rather than rasterizing it.

I understand you don't "think" it's the problem, but I guarantee you it is. "DPI" means dots per inch. Changing the setting to 300 dpi will not make it magically have 207 more dots per inch, because you drew it at 93. It will just stretch it, or mathematically rescale the proportions and suggest an ideal print size of around 10x12. Of course it looks great on your phone and computer. You made it at a screen resolution. Unfortunately that means it will look jagged or blurry when stretched to a larger scale than designed for, so you'll have to redraw over top of the art or do an auto-trace to vectorize it, because a vector can be infinitely scaled. This is unlikely to be perfect but the easiest getaround I can think of for you. Vectorizer. https://www.vectorizer.io/ Then since Photoshop only has limited vector features you'd open in Illustrator or Inkscape to scale it up. If you use Mac, SuperVectorizer2 works all right.

[Bretton]

Nothing else to add here. Public archives normally work at least with 600 DPI when scanning, so this can give an idea of what may be a correct resolution for image quality/accuracy. This makes huge files tho: that's why I normally tend to work with 300 DPI, as my computer proves to start to have problems processing workflow at higher res; but never go bellow 200 DPI if the image is supposed to be printed.

Hope this problem gets fixed in a satisfactory way; I'd hate such magnificient work becoming partly wasted because of res issues.

[Edward II of Kenland]

Wow, thank you everyone for your wonderful advice! I just did a little test print on my home computer after upscaling the image to 300dpi and also adding some vector text next to the upscaled text and the new vectorized text looks way better, even on that printer! Very strange that it looks so crisp on screen but so bad printed! Now this is a longshot, but does anyone know of a plugin or something of the sort that will automatically detect text in an image and then insert in a text layer? If not I may go in and retype all of the text layers on a few of my duchy maps. I unfortunately do not have the patience to do that on every area of Kenland though. It looks certainly fine just being upscaled and I may just print it again just with that, but of course things look better making them with new text layers!

On top: Home print at 72 dpi.
Middle: The map from UPS store
Bottom: Upscaled home print with test for new text layers.
The funny thing here is that I feel like my original DPI homeprint still looks better than the UPS store print.
text.jpg

Thank you very much everyone for your wonderful advice!