A few weeks ago we discussed the magnificent collection of Public Domain performing arts posters held by the Library of Congress (many of which have been scanned and are available online for download) in the following post…

Public Domain Performing Arts Posters At The Library Of Congress

Since then, our friend Marg asked a great question that I want to address in this post…

Hey Logan,

I went looking at the Library of Congress site and would like to download some of the posters. However, when I click on the link to the uncompressed TIFF version of the poster to get the larger size it comes up as a movie, not a file I can use. I downloaded the larger size poster but it is only about 800 x 1200 pixels at 300 dpi; not big enough to make a poster from.

How do you get the larger sized poster? That would really help.

Thanks
Marg

Hi Marg,

I’m not sure exactly which poster you are working with in your example, but I can give you some general guidelines by showing you a few examples of my own that may help.

Let’s take a closer look at the following poster in the Library of Congress Performing Arts Poster Collection…

This specific poster from the collection can be found at the link below…

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/var.1606

Following the link above will land you on a page that looks like this…

When you look at the bibiographic information under MEDIUM, you’ll see that the original poster size is 108 x 72 cm.

Converted to inches, that’s roughly 42 in x 28 in.

If you need help converting centimeters to inches (like me) use the Google Unit Conversion Tool at the link below…

http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html#calculator

42 in x 28 in is HUGE considering that the two most common non-film, commercial poster sizes are 18” X 24” and 24” X 36” (in the U.S. anyway).

Film posters are usually produced at 27 in X 40 in.

In our example here, if you click on the thumbnail image of the poster at the top of the page, you’ll be brought to another page that shows all available versions of the poster.

Strangely enough, at the very top of this new page you’ll see a link to “Retrieve uncompressed archival TIFF version (16 megabytes)” as shown in the image below…

However, that’s not the one you want (although in some cases it’s all that’s offered)…

If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a section that looks like this…

It’s this section that contains the archival version you’re looking for as shown in the image above. Again, not every poster in the collection will have this additional link but where available, this is definitely the one you will want to work with to create posters.

After downloading the uncompressed archival TIFF version found at the link above, opening it in Photoshop and taking a look at the image size will reveal the following dimensions…

You’ll see that the image is sized at about 4.1 in X 5.1 in  (small) but…

The DPI is 1200 so there’s some room to blow this thing up and still maintain a DPI of 300 (which is the DPI you would want to maintain for print quality production).

At this point, anyone with mad Photoshop skills could take this image and massage it into decent sized poster.

I’ll the first to admit that I don’t have mad Photoshop skills, I have sad Photoshop skills.

When mad skills are required I hire people more talented than I to do what needs to be done but…

I am completely self-taught (which means I am probably doing everything wrong but it hasn’t hurt me yet) and know just enough about Photoshop to be dangerous but even with my sad skills, I can give you a few amateur pointers.

This isn’t intended to be a step-by-step Photoshop tutorial – there are much more qualified sites for that but my goal is (and always has been) to help you as much as I possibly can when it comes to learning to use Public Domain content to create products that you can sell.

So, in that spirit I’ll offer up a quick run-through of what would need to happen to get this thing up to a size that you could actually produce a real poster with.

This is what the poster image we have downloaded looks like in Photoshop (sized visually at 8.33%)…

First off, you can see that some cropping needs to be done so we just need to trim off the edges of the image to remove all of the peripheral “junk”.

The most important thing to realize here is that you don’t want to do anything yet that is going to alter your DPI (1200).

I usually crop the image by simply adjusting the canvas size until I’ve achieved something like the results below (I also had to straighten up the poster itself a bit using the Transform > Rotate tool because it’s slightly askew)…

That leaves me with an image with the following dimensions…

At this point, you can play around with the poster to fix any flaws, adjust color, contrast, and lighting, and apply filters to acheive specific effects – in other words this is the time to use all of the built-in tools that make Photoshop such a powerful application.

Ask your local Photoshop expert with help here or pickup a Photoshop book and teach yourself some tricks – it’ll definitely pay off if you’re going to invest time in creating a poster business!

After you’re satisfied with the look of your poster, it’s time to blow it up to poster size (or as close as possible).

Remember, I said that you really don’t want to drop below 300 DPI for print quality posters (although sometimes you can get away with 200 DPI under the right circumstances)?

The goal is to blow this image up as large as you can get without going under 300 DPI.

With that said, the easiest way to do this is (with my limited skillset anyway) is adjust the image size properties as such…

Here’s what I did in a nutshell ~ I removed the check from “Resample Image” and then I adjusted the “Resolution” (DPI) to 300 – Photoshop automatically adjusted the width and height for me based on the Resolution I entered.

After applying these new settings, I end up with an image like such (notice the horizontal and vertical rulers bars)…

So now I have an image of the poster that’s roughly 11 inches wide by 16 inches tall and at 300 DPI so it’s still of print quality (don’t forget to apply a “Sharpen” filter before saving in it’s final format).

Granted, that’s a far cry from the original poster size of 28 in X 42 inches but until the Library of Congress provides these as actual size MrSid format downloads (like they do with many of the maps and other items in their collections), that’s about as good as it gets for now.

At this size (11 in x 16 in) any posters you print would more than likely be referred to as “Mini Poster Prints”. If you added a mat and a frame, it’d look great (plus it would appear bigger!).

And by the way, the size we’ve just come up with here would work great for reproducing these posters on t-shirts too.

Also, there’s quite a good market out there (especially on sites like eBay) for unique prints – make sure you call them “prints” in  this case, not posters ~ prints have a higher perceived value.

For more information on this – get  “Avril Harper’s Guide To Vintage Paper Profits” included in the Public Domain Treasure Hunters Kit as a Bonus!

Another option would be to combine 4 or more of these images with related themes to create one full size poster.

Botton line, even though you don’t have access to the actual full-size posters, you still have free access to these archival quality scans.

By applying a little bit of creativity, there’s a lot of great products that could be created from these images and with over 2000 posters to choose from, you can get a lot of mileage out of this collection.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for asking Marg!

P.S. – You mentioned that when you click on  the uncompressed TIFF link, it tries to open the file as a movie…

The only thing I can assume there is that for some reason your system is setup to open files with a .tiff extension in a media player of some sort (probably QuickTime).

Try right-clicking the link instead of left-clicking and either “Save Target As” or “Save Link As” depending on what browser you are using to save the file to your local machine first, then attempt to open in your photo editor of choice.

About The Author:

Logan Andrew is an online entrepreneur, information publisher, and author that has been using Public Domain material to create profitable products and businesses since 2001. He is also co-author of "The Public Domain Treasure Hunter's Survival Kit" available here. For more info Logan, click here.

[print_link]

Recommended Reading: