Kickstarter

Creator Robert D. Jansen on October 1, 2012

Hey wisser,
Which image did you print? How large? Can you tell other backers how you did it? Some folks are having difficultioes, and your experience could help them. Thanks.
Bob Jansen

Creator Robert D. Jansen on September 22, 2012

James,
You betcha! I have learned a lot from you backers, and one of the things I didnt know about was JPEG re-compression artifacts. So I am switching to PNG. and Yes I will be doing the whole portfolio over, but not only in PNG, but with new equipment arriving soon, at higher resolution, 300 dpi at 6 by 4 feet. I could not render this definition with my present equipment, but I will be able to soon with a super graphics card and 16 GB of RAM.
I know that some of these images print just fine the way they are: I have actually done so. But others, need more resolution, and I am going to give it to you as soon as I am able. Stay tuned.
Bob Jansen

Creator Robert D. Jansen on September 19, 2012

Chris,

I cannot find an HP 300 FP when I google it, even on the HP site. Is that a 64 inch large format printer?

When you say you printed "1200 x 1800" what do you mean? 1200 inches by 1800 inches? cm? pixels? And what do you mean by it being "your 48 x 72"? If you mean pixels, you would be printing at 400 dpi. I have no idea what printing 1200 inches by 1800 inches could mean.

When you say they have not come out very well, do you mean you are getting pixilating in the image? Or do you mean the colors are dark or muddy? How large is the print, in inches, please. I cannot be of any help at all if you are not more exact in your descriptions. As it is, I have no idea how large the print is or what exactly is wrong with it.

I have not printed Diaphanous except in 11 x 17 inch, and it came out fine once I had adjusted the brightness and contrast in photoshop. This is called color calibration, and I warned backers they would have to do it in my initial presentation.

I have printed Sistine at 4 feet by six feet on canvas and it came out beautifully. I have also printed it 2 by 4 feet and 11 by 17 inches, all just fine.No pixilating, colors good.

But I did have to adjust gamma and brightness and contrast differently for each printer. Do you know how to do this? Do you have a good graphics program like Photoshop or Corel? I also used very expensive printers, one costing almost $30,000 and the other 11x17 inch about $10,000. I have warned backers about using little home printers, 8.5 by 11 inch. There is a reason why professional printers cost 100 times as much.

EPS is vector format. These attractors were originally rendered to JPEG format and no flame fractal software outputs to verctor format, that I know of. Conversions to vector format dont work for most photos without seriously changing them. I explained this in my last message.

I have placed a couple of new documents in the skydrive folder on printing suggestions, upsampling, vectorization, and other things. Please read them.

Bob Jansen

Creator Robert D. Jansen on September 17, 2012

Hi, Chris,
None of the images I have printed at 100dpi have been pixilated. But I have only been able to afford to print three of them, Touche, Blue Snout, and Sistine. That is, after all, what the wormhole project was all about: to provide the funding so that I could print these images in large format. My large format printing experience has been based on those three attractors, and they printed beautifully at 100dpi, no pixilating at all.

The funding from the Wormhole project has not been released to me yet, Amazon delays payout for two weeks. So I have not had a chance ot print any more images to further test whether 100dpi will be as adequate for all images as it was for the first three I printed.I had every reason to think it would be, and I certainly hope it is. One or two of the wormhole images can be rerendered at higher definition, and I fully intend to do so if necessary. As I have said elsewhere, improvements to these images will appear in the Skydrive folder as they are accomplished.

So, and this is important, could you please tell me exactly which image(s) showed pixilating at exactly what printing size? What printer was used, and what surface? These images vary in pixel count. Which means that the printing sizes should also vary. I will replicate here, and see if I get the same results. If you are getting pixilating in Touche, Blue Snout, or Sistine at 100dpi, there is some sort of other problem, since they do not show any pixilating in my prints. One possibility is compression artifacts in the JPEGs. I have not seen this personally, but I am routiney rendering to bmp and PNG, then converting to JPEG as well, to avoid this but this is all new territory.

Re vector conversions: Not going to work, I am afraid. They come out looking like an impressionist version of an attractor, blotchy. Most of detail is lost. There is a small mad hope that it may be possible to render directly to vector format, but that is still under investigation.
Bob Jansen

Creator Robert D. Jansen on September 15, 2012

Aaron,
I have printed Sistine, which has a resolution of 7200 by 4800 pixels, at half size, or 24 by 36 inchs, on canvas, as a matter of fact, and it looks good. These are fractal designs, after all, not photographs, so there is no gold standard for how they should appear. And they do appear slighty different, sometimes greatly different, in every medium they are rendered. The canvas makes the image more diffuse and softer, but if you dont mind less "pop" and blacks that are not very black, the line resolution is up to the job. I like handling a stretched canvas, and it makes them seem more expensive. 24 by 36 is still pretty big for a graphic, but it works fine. The 11 by 17 inch prints of Sistine look fine too, if you tweak the contrast and brightness or gamma in photoshop.
Bob Jansen

Creator Robert D. Jansen on September 14, 2012

Aaron,
I did something similar recently, while making a video for my new project. I wanted to show the detail of the images on a small screen, so I went into photoshop and displayed at pixel size, and cropped a screen- full. You are suggesting something similar only making three contiguous orthogonal crops. I will try this myself, but there is no reason why it should not work fine. There are poster making programs that do just this, and let the client paste the several pages together. As long as you get the edges right, it looks fine.
Bob Jansen

Creator Robert D. Jansen on September 14, 2012

Hi Doug.
I have just printed a 48 by 72, a 48 by 49 and a 48 by 54 and they all came out looking really great. I know that printers usually say they need 300 dpi, but that simply does not seem to be the case with these fractals.I do not understand why very small prints look so bad but I warned against printing too small in another comment because I did some small printing, and they looked awful. I have just printed Sistine, Blue Snout and Touche in very large formats, and they all came out incredibly sharp at 100dpi. A 4 by 6 foot Sistine was purchased the first day it was displayed.
I used a great machine, a $29,000 Mutah. This might be the difference.
I have investigated vertorizing these JPEGS and it does not seem feasible. They need to be rendered directly to vector format, we think. The conversion process would see them as photographs, we believe. I will try some conversions, nevertheless and do a backer update with the results.
I will be printing all of the images large as soon as I have funds released to me, but the first three suggest that they will look great. Can you try a large print?

Bob Jansen

Creator Robert D. Jansen on September 12, 2012

Hi Heather,
Your email has made my day. Tell your son that I often walk into these wormholes, and they take you to a galaxy far away.
Bob Jansen.

Creator Robert D. Jansen on September 12, 2012

Hi Sertunc,
Thank you for your kind words. Re the size of the print, I have found that 100dpi is a good idea for fractals, and to print on vinyl whenever possible. That means you look at the pixel dimensions of the image, which varies from image to image, and divide by 100. So if the pixels are 5400 By 3600, it is best to print 54 inches by 36 inches. You can usually print larger with fractals, down to about 72 dpi, but at some point you might start to get pixelating unless you vectorize the jpegs, which you can do if you have the conversion software. See Vector Magic.com for an explanation of vector formats.

I will be putting more printing instructions in the email that gives you the SkyDrive downloading permissions.
Bob Jansen

Creator Robert D. Jansen on September 11, 2012

Thanks Lucas, and thanks to everybody else. Somebody said that happiness is getting more than you expected. And this is certainly that.

I will have the backer survey for email addresses tomorrow. I need them to send the download permissions.
Great campaign. Great backers.
Bob Jansen