Printing photos in Scale

QUOTE: I work with computers and really never looked into scale printing so to speak.

If I had known that I wouldn't have gone into so much detail One bad thing about forums is that you frequently don't know how much detail to go into with an answer. Some people need a lot of instructions, some don't, and you seldom know which way to go.

QUOTE: I was fooling around with it last night and was able to shring the phot of the flag to 1.47 and print it to the size it should be. Again thanks for the help.

Glad you got it to work. As I mentioned, I work with aerial photos a lot and getting things set up so the photos are aligned and scaled properly can be a chore sometimes.

Scott, thanks so much for the info. I work with computers and really never looked into scale printing so to speak. I was fooling around with it last night and was able to shring the phot of the flag to 1.47 and print it to the size it should be. Again thanks for the help.

I don't know of any software that will do it for you automatically, although there could certainly be something available that I don't know about. You can always get something to print at a specific size though.

Photos, in general, are not to any scale. They are just framed to fit the camera format. Additionally, there is frequently some perspective to deal with and possibly some distortion. I work with aerial photos so I have to deal with that a lot.

If you want to print something to a specific scale, in addition to the resolution of your printer, you have to know one of two things:
1) Exactly how big was the original
-- or --
2) Exactly how big should the scale print be

Assuming that you know how big the original is, divide that by the scale. For example, something that is 35' long in real life would be 1' long at 1/35 scale. A 6' long flag at 1/35 scale would be 6' / 35 = 0.171' or 0.171 * 12 = 2.057" long.

Multiply that value times your printer's resolution. If your printer has a resolution off 600 dpi (dpi is dots per inch) and your printed image needs to be 2.057" long then it will have to be 600 * 2.057 = 1234 pixels wide. Remember that this is the subject itself, not the entire photograph. You may have to use your graphic software to measure the width of the subject in the photo and then resize the image to the proper size.