The Math of Photoshop XL
Although I've worked on a lot of large digital drawings, 1,187 inches long is definitely the largest digital file I've ever had to deal with. At 150 DPI this file ends up being about 99 feet long and 10 inches tall. If this image were taken as one frame it would require a 279 megapixel camera.
The image file itself is 178,175 pixels wide by 1,567 pixels tall with a file size of 1.16 gigabytes. It's contains a collage of 150 digital photographs combined with a rendered image. The image represents a stretch of land that runs for about two thirds of a mile, which means that every inch in the drawing represents about 3 feet in real life.
The rendering program I used is limited to 16,000 pixels as a maximum width, which means the render was segmented into 12 chunks and output one by one. Saving the file also presented some software limitations. Photoshop is not overly happy about saving images larger than 30,000 pixels in either dimension.
Unfortunately it's unlikely that I will ever output the image at this resolution. Not only is the design still nascent (which is scary given that I have to present at the final in 10 days), but printing for a 99'x1' image would cost somewhere around $450. Scaling the image down to 1/10th its original size results in a strip which is 80" long, meaning that if you print eight 1"x10" strips you can fit almost the entire image on a standard sheet of paper.
Is it summer yet?
--Posted 05/14/04 01:32AM