While surfing/reading blogs, I ended up at Chris Pirillo's site and followed a link to this great Rasterbation site.
What is rasterbation? There are many definitions but it boils down to useless graphic exercises.
Well, I am all about useless graphic exercises, so I uploaded a test photo. I used a photo of my eye. The first thing that caught me off guard was that the default size of the image was HUGE. I resized it down to the point where it would only use 8 sheets of paper. After all, this is only a test.
The printer I used would not print all the way to the edge of the paper so, as instructed, I made sure the “shrink to fit” option was checked. I printed the 8 pages and then trimmed most of the margins off. I trimmed a margin off that I shouldn't have and ended up having to trim the entire top margin off of the image so that it would look right, but I consider it a learning experience, now I know. I left margins where possible so I could put them under the neighboring sheets. I only taped down the hidden margins so that the final result would not have visible tape. This didn't work completely, though, and I did end up with 2 small pieces of (slightly/almost) visible tape.
Here is my advice to anyone involved in rasterbationary activities:
- Use a photo that looks good in black and white. If the colors are crucial to a photograph's value, don't bother because the rastered result will have no color.
- Measure your target area first. Then find out how many sheets of paper are needed to cover that area. Then upload and size the image. If you can not print to the edge, be sure to count a sheet as 8“ x 10.5” and not 8.5” x 11“. It may not matter for a small image but when dealing with a final product that is 8 sheets wide, you will be off by about 4 inches, that could make a lot of extra work for you.
- You can easily and instantly toggle between size and crop modes. You should crop your image so that it takes up the largest amount of space possible in order to keep from having to trim the paper later and ending up with a strangely proportioned image.
- Unless you are trying to make it look like your photo's subject was on the far side of a French door, trim the margins before you hang the result. Look at the gallery. The images look good but the trimmed images look right.
So, this is the image I ended up with. It needs a black matte, but I am very happy with how it turned out. I really didn't expect it to be this good, I thought it would take a few tries to hit the “acceptable” range. I am happy to say that this image is good enough for me to keep, but I won't. I have great and terrible plans now and that puny thing must go to make room for the monstrosity that I am creating.