.bmp re-sizing

[Barbara Buhse]

I seem to be having brain freeze, because although I have have no problem in the past wiht this, all of a sudden I seem to have forgotten something here:
Here's the problem.

I have a nice logo in .bmp format here which I would like to re-seize for engraving. When I resize it, It engraves with pixel-like imaging, where I can see the "dots"... so in the past, I have just resampled the .bmp an it worked fine. or, I have used photograv to smooth it out. However, this time photograv won't work becasue I am getting gray (or should I say, not solid black) where I should have black. SO, how do I go about resixing a .bmp for engraving? Its a black and white graphic, so something tells me its simple but I'm forgetting something. I would like to use this same graphic for multiple projects, and would like it in an easy to re-size form for the future.

Barbara

[Joe Pelonio]

In your case it may be that in the past you have started with higher resolution bitmaps that when enlarged maintained enough quality, and that this one is lower resolution so when enlarged it gets pixelated. Try printing it on a printer in original and larger sizes and see if it's worse larger. Also open it in Paint and see if it is black and white rather than greyscale, and sometimes even opening the bmp and saving as a .tif before resizing helps.

[Dean Flannery]

Hi Barbara
I have run into the same problem when customers give me small pictures and want larger engravings.
One way I found to get around this problem is to scan the image at a high resolution (1200 to 4800 dpi) then enlarge it in your photo program while dropping the resolution to 300-600 dpi.
Dean

[Barbara Buhse]

Thanks, I'll try changing it to .tif... I didn't scan the original, it came on a disk already, and I thought the resolution was good, since this is the digital image they give out whenever they have something printed, so I'll play around with it. Thanks

Barbara

[Joe Pelonio]

Barbara,

Often the graphic designer gives the client a disk with the artwork as it was used in printing letterhead, envelopes and business cards. That's
a pain for us in the sign business, since those are printed so small that
they don't need much resolution, and then they want us to do something like a logo on the side of a 20' truck. Often if thou have them go back to the designer they will have an .eps or at least a .tif. It's good to get into the habit of asking for that, or you end up with a lot of really bad jpgs that they saved from their website.

[Barbara Buhse]

Joe,
the disk I got had pretty good sized logo, I only needed to resize it a little. the TIF worked great... I had another issue too, which was that since I needded to put it on a painted brass disk, I had to reverse it. When reversing, the white turned to light gray. I solved this by increasing the contrast, so now the logo is perfect...
thanks for all your help

Barbara