Need to print a 8×8 foot beach banner. Anyone know where I can get a picture of high enough resolution?
As banners that large typically would be observed at a distance of four feet (slightly more than a meter) or more, then a resolution of 72 dpi should be enough – refer to our article on calculating resolutions for prints for the exact formula. Translated to pixels, you would need an image with 6192 pixels wide and high — since this is a square image after all.
The pixel count came from the following calculation:
8 feet * 12 inches/foot * 72 dots/inch = 6192 dots (pixels)
In megapixels, this would be an image of about 38 megapixels large – coming from multiplying 6192 pixels wide and 6192 pixels high. To put things into perspective, an iPhone 8 is able to capture 12 megapixels using its back-facing camera.
If you have a 38 megapixel camera (or better like the Phase One IQ1080), that’s great then you’re all set.
If not then you’re in a predicament. Don’t try to upscale it naively on your photo-editing app, which usually uses either bicubic interpolation or Lanzcos resampling. Using those two “simple” algorithms to enlarge images for prints would likely create blurry outputs — which won’t be any better than handing out the original images to the vendor printing the banner.
Fortunately Bigger Picture can enhance images up to 8x without making it blurry. Hence you can use even a lowly iPhone to create 8-foot banners that looks sharp.
Simply load the image into Bigger Picture at and enter the desired pixel dimensions like the following screenshot.
Go ahead and see for yourself – try out Bigger Picture for less than a song.
