Gadgetory

hey I'm Donnell Bell and today I'm going to show you how to print out a giant poster using any standard printer you'll need a computer a printer some scissors and some glue you also need a picture lighter images with lots of contrast tend to scale and print best they also use up less ink also remember printing copyrighted material is against the law so just stick to your own photos and graphics the first step is to use our computer to scale up the image and process it so that it can be printed out across multiple sheets of paper if you just want an accurate blown-up version of any image upload it to a site like faster poster or block posters and will spit out a downloadable PDF aside from the fact that the image has been diced up there's not a lot of processing going on here so it's great for school projects or printing out a big sign for your garage sale but you'll have to accept that it's going to look a little Frankenstein once you glue it together now if the goal is something pretty to hang on the wall I recommend embracing imperfection and going a little abstract there's a great but unfortunately named program out there called raster bader that scales images up using a halftone effect this makes them a little more forgiving the stitch together and the result has a nice Andy Warhol vibe the program is a free download for Windows but a ported version for Mac and Linux is also out there so check out my posts on SEANET how-to for links and details once you open up the software select the image choose the paper size you'll be printing to and how many sheets wide you want the poster to be on the next page you'll find a checkbox that will put a cut out guide around the image I recommend having that on you also have a setting for halftone dots size generally small dots work best for smaller prints and big dots are meant for the big stuff but play around with it there's also a setting here for the color mode if you have a full color printer try multicolor or go artsy by choosing a custom monochrome color if all you have is a black and white printer don't worry the results are still pretty cool and sometimes even cooler than going full color finally choose where the file is going to go and then hit raster bate you now the PDF of your image all chopped up and ready to go you'll see what each page is going to look like when printed but before you do that see if you can scrounge up some thick paper to print on it'll be easier to cut easier to glue and it's not going to warp as easily as cheap copy paper also if you're printing a black and white tricolor paper to punch things up after you print that out all the pages it's time to cut them up and then glue them together the pro method is to trim off all the edges with a paper cutter and then glue the arrange sections to a poster board but the quick and cheap way to go is to slice the edges off of every other page so that you have a little lip here that you can glue on to now I did this one here with just a pair of scissors and a glue stick and then I flipped it over and I taped up the seams on the back for a little extra support now depending on how many pages you end up with this could take some time to assemble and chances are you're going to mess up your first attempt and want to start over but it gets easier as you go along and by the time you're done you're going to end up with something like this it's not perfect but I think it looks pretty cool from a distance so there you go those are my favorite options for printing up big posters from a small printer follow me on Twitter for more tips like these or subscribe to my updates on Facebook also be sure to check out my full write-up on CNET how-to for more details and links for cnet.com I'm Donnell Bell happy raster baby