Printing an 8 Foot 4 Inch Long Gigapan Panorama on Canvas

The 8 foot pano, John Nichols and Sespe Red, “Voted Most Intelligent Cat In Santa Paula”.

Now that I have learned to operate my Gigapan Robot and taken a couple of panos it was time to see what happens when I print one.  The above pano was stitched from 68 separate images taken with the Canon G9 mounted to the robot.  I have uploaded it to the Gigapan site and then imbedded it into Google Earth.  When people search Santa Paula with Google Earth they can see a little blue pushpin with a G on it that indicates that a Gigapan photo has been taken of that site.  My Gigapan is here.

Next step for me was to make a print.  Before I stitched all the images I worked on them in RAW as outlined in my previous post.  Then I out put that file as a tiff. I treated it like any other photo I would work on.  I adjusted the curves and levels in CS3.  I cloned in some sky at the top.  I cropped.  I zoomed up to 100% and sharpened.  I thought about burning in the left and right ends but I think that in nature the haze would have made those sections hazy in real life.  I want my photos to look like what I saw.

I made a “small” print on my Canon IPF 5000.  That one is 13 inches tall by about 60 inches wide.  I stopped at 60 because foamcore comes in 40×60 sheets.  Larger than that and I would have had to splice pieces together.  For this smaller print I just wanted to mount it to foam core and not stretch it over stretcher bars like a painting on canvas.  I printed the smaller one and mounted it and put it in a frame and put it in my gallery front window.  It attracts a lot of attention.  At the time I printed that size my 24 inch wide hp Z3100 was acting up.

The Z3100 cured itself and I was ready to print larger.  I chose 20 inches high so I would have some canvas left over on the edges for stretching.  That made this particular pano 100 inches long.  Divided by 12 inches that makes 8 feet 4 inches in length.  The Z3100 will print that long.  Some printers won’t.  I think I read that this printer will print up to 30 feet long.  I’m still learning that.  I’m also still learning how large a file Photoshop will work with.  I ran into a maximum files size of 2 Gigs.  CS3 will save larger files but they have to be in a special format and I was worried that those would not print so I stopped at 2Gig.

Next step for me was to just print one full size to look at.  I know that may seem like a waste of money.  Cost for a print this size is probably about $25. I could have printed out a smaller section.  I just wanted to see the large one.  What came out took about 45 minutes to print.  I push pinned it to the wall and admired it.  The colors in the mountains were greener than the print done on the Canon IPF 5000.  Different printers and different profiles.  I had soft proffed the image but even with a calibrated monitor that did not tell me what I needed to know.  I found some bad spots in the cloudy sky and in the mountains at the far right edge.

You should probably know the resolution for a print.  For printing on canvas I can use 240 ppi ( that’s pixels per inch) at the final print size of 20×100 inches.  Don’t think in dpi. That’s “Dots per Inch”.  There are no dots on a computer screen or in a file.  The photographic industry has mislead us for years.  Let’s reclaim PPI and use DPI only for what a printing nozle spits out.  My standard workflow procedure on this issue is to get the largest file I can as my master. When I scan old photos I ask the client or myself…”What is the largest print you will ever want to make from this image?”  If you want to make a 2 foot by 8 foot image from your panos at any time in the future you had better obtain one that is 240 ppi at 20 x 100 inches.  It will be large.  If in the future you don’t want it that large then downsample it for other uses.  That’s a much better plan that upsampling an image later from a smaller file.  Hard disk space is cheap now.  Use it.

I want back to the file and opened it this time in Lightroom 2.  That has amazing controls.  I used all the tools I could in the develop module.  exposure, clarity, etc. and them moved down to the Saturation.  In Lightroom I can click on a button in the HSL area and the slider will do something magical.  Looks like it creates a mask for just the color I clicked on. In this case I wanted to bring down the Saturation in the mountains so I selected one area with the color I wanted to change and moved it down about 10 points.  Only those colors in the images moved down and the mountains were looking good.

At this large size I think that the image can “jump” a little more than in a smaller image.  I bumped up the colors a little more that I usually do.  Now I’m ready to print the next one.  I still have some thinking to do.  In a lot of the vintage panoramas in my collection the photographer wrote his name and the title in white opaque ink on the negative.  This caused the name and title and date to appear in the print as white.  It seems important to me to show the date of the Bird’s Eye View panorama of a town.  People in the future will want to be able to compare how a town has grown and changed.  I have a vintage pano of Santa Paula taken from almost the same location.  It is dated 1927 and is by Bernie Isensee of Ventura.  I think I’ll just Photoshop in some white lettering with my name and the subject and the date.  In the lower right corner a few inches in.

My next step will be to order some stretcher bars.  They come in 10 foot lengths.  UPS does not deliver packages that long so if you get into this you will have to buy retail or have them shipped by a carrier that handles long packages.  Then you will have to learn to stretch canvas.  There is a Wiki lesson and I’m sure a You Tube lesson in how to.  I have the tools and am pretty good at it.  It does take practice.  You cut the stretcher bars on a 45 degree.  Then I glue one short leg and one long leg together and let dry.  Next step is to underpin them.  If you don’t own an underpinner you could use finishing nails to secure the corners.  The next step then is to glue the two Ls you have made together.  I use band clamps.  This size job would require hooking up two or three bands into one long one.  Or just Micky Mouse it.

Frames also come in 10 foot lengths.  For that reason I think I’ll stay under 10 feet in length.  Longer is possible buy a challenge.  Splicing and putty and finish and paint and sand and glue and …

I’m using Breathing Color canvas.  I like it.  What I don’t like about the company is that they don’t offer their paper in sheets and rolls in every variety.  I prefer sheets for small jobs.  For that reason I’m using Moab products.  Everything comes in sheet and roll.

One more step in the process will be to coat the canvas with a UV and water repellent coating.  I brush it on with a foam roller. There are video tutorials on this on the Breathing Color web site.  It takes a little practice.  You can also spray a coating on.  More expensive but easier.  Just spray it on to a vertical print.  I have been getting blobs of the spray spitting out onto the print and creating the rim of a circle after that I don’t like.  I have to go back and work more spray into that area and hope.

Time for dinner.  I’ll be thinking about the next, next step.  How much to charge for this masterpiece.

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