adobe photoshop - What resolution should a large format artwork for print be?

For wall-sized graphics and large banners (e.g 3m x 5m), what is an acceptable PPI for print?

As I understand it 300 PPI is the typical for 'small' artworks (esp. for clean text resolution). However, for small artworks, the audience usually engages at a much closer distance. Therefore in the interests of keeping a bitmap file down to a reasonable size can you get away with a much-reduced PPI for a large format/banner print?

Answer

In general you should use vector graphics in the artwork wherever practical, and deliver final artwork to the printer in PDF or other vector format. Your finished print will then be limited only by the output resolution of the print device.

This is particularly important with text and line art — visible rasterization in the finished print will be very obvious and look amateurish.

While a PDF can contain photographic images, they will have a fixed resolution, and while 300 ppi is a good rule of thumb for publications and small posters viewed at close range, there's no way you'll achieve anything close to that at the dimensions you're talking about. Certainly you should aim for as high as possible, but I don't think there's a hard-and-fast lower limit. I've certainly ended up with around 75ppi in photographic elements of 2m high event banners, which looked fine at relative distance. I never felt the need to do any interpolated upscaling of the raster images.

So, again in general, your workflow would be:

• produce raster elements in Photoshop and output as TIFF files


• create complex vector elements like logos or illustration in Illustrator and output as EPS or PDF files



• compose the final artwork in InDesign, linking in the raster and vector files, adding text and simple vector elements like colour blocks.


• output the composite PDF from InDesign, ensuring that raster elements are output at their native resolution, i.e. not downsampled to a particular output resolution.