dorothee is back from downtown erlangen, having picked up yesterday’s mystery parcel from the post office: it a tube with the four 40×60cm photo prints i’d ordered wednesday night from bildpartner.de — exciting! they’ve turned out to be quite well, with a matte finish, the carrier apparently being a resin coated paper. the photos do not cover all of the paper, there are 4–5cm white stripes at the top and bottom.
the prints are so good that i discuss with dorothee my next photo project: producing an isle of wight photo poster in A1 format — we get a bit confused about the actual size of A1 and whether it shouldn’t really be A0, so i go to the font of all knowledge, to wikipedia and look up DIN A4 and end up at first at the wikipedia page on paper sizes and then at markus kuhn’s page on international paper sizes — and learn that german toilet paper is mostly DIN A6 in size (but if you are now thinking how typical german to have that regulated, well, as markus points out, the US is not much better or worse), that the A1 format we are interested in is 594×841mm in size and is actually quite close in size to the traditional elephant (711×584mm) or colombier (876×597mm) paper sizes, and that “US paper manufacturers have truly bizarre” ways of specifying the weight of their paper.. also, you might want to check into the relationship of DIN A4 paper and the first and last book of the bible and how the existence of DIN A4 paper is really an indication of god’s existence (thx to markus’s very informative page for the link to that titbit, again) — then, again, you might not…(some of our fellow christians do get up to weird stuff, i have to admit)
returning from this detour and having sorted out that we do want A1 (594×841mm), i proceed to figure out what pixel density is required: the 400×600mm prints look quite good, the resolution was 3264×2448pixels which is a bit less than 6pixels/mm in each direction. that gives me the following values for gimp:
- pixel dimensions: 3564 x 5046 pixels
- print size: 594.00 x 841.00 millimetres
- resolution: 6 x 6 pixels/mm
which gives a base picture size of 137MB (uncompressed XCF format).
