Make your own poster with Rasterbator

27 Jul 2009 @ 7:18 PM

Do you feel bored with your room? Want to add something different to refresh it? How about adding a poster of your favorite picture? zz 3 Make your own poster with Rasterbator

It can be a picture of your favorite actor or actress, a picture of your family members (boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, children, etc.), a funny picture from your favorite cartoon, or any picture that makes you feel happy, fun, motivated, and refreshed whenever you’re looking at it. The picture selection is important here, since you’re going to look at it every time you enter your room. If by looking at this poster makes you feel better after your hard day at work or school, then it’s a good choice. Ok, let’s go on…

To create our personal poster, we need an application called Rasterbator (don’t ask me why the author named it that way. i just don’t know). So what is this Rasterbator? Rasterbator is an application that produce rasterbated image to any bigger size than the original size, in the shape of dots. Confusing huh? Take it this way. Rasterbator is an application that makes it possible for us to create a poster with the size of a wall in your room (or even much bigger), from a picture with just the size of you computer’s wallpaper (or even smaller for less quality poster). You can download it here. This application is a freeware. So you do not have to pay to get and use it. Nice huh? zz 16 Make your own poster with Rasterbator

So, do you downloaded it yet? Yes? Ok, now we move on…

Extract the zip file you downloaded just now. You can extract this to anywhere you want.

After it’s extracted, you’ll see the file named Rasterbator.exe. Double click on it to run this application.

You will see this interface

You can select the language you want to use from the available selections. Simply click on the language you want, and click Continue.

The next step is to select your favorite picture as the image source as shown in the screenshot below

Simply click Browse and select your image, then click Continue.

Now, we select the paper size we would like to use to print.

You can select the paper size and the orientation too in this screen. Be it portrait or landscape, it’s all for you to choose. Use your imagination to determine which orientation suits your image selection.

In this screen, you can define the output size of your poster. You can choose how much width or heights of your poster based on the width or height of the paper size (and orientation) you selected before. You can also see the poster widths and heights (it’s 1.08 x 1.43 meter in the screenshot above), and how many paper sheets do we need to print our poster (ie. 5 sheets width x 6 sheets height = 30 sheets of paper in the screenshot above). You can set this as big as you want. Virtually there is no limit. Except the amount of your papers, inks, and times to print and work on it. zz 14 Make your own poster with Rasterbator

Next, you can set the rasterbation (the author of this application invent this word too) options as shown here

The first option is when checked, every page printed will have a dim rectangle around it. This rectangle can be used to make us easier to cut away the blank margins. If your printer can print all the way to the edge of the paper, then you can uncheck this option. Most printers cannot do this. So if your printer can’t, you may want to leave this option checked.

Second option here is to set how big the size of the rasterbation dots. The bigger the number, the lower the poster’s sharpness, but the less ink you need. The smaller the number, the higher the poster’s sharpness, but will consume more ink to print them. I use 3 – 5mm myself. You can play around with the number though.

The third and last option here is to set the poster’s color. You can set it to black only, or custom color, or use the original color from the source image. Again, this is depends on the source image you chose, and how do you want the poster to be. There’s no rule to it. After all set, click Continue.

We’re almost done here. Bear with me. zz 15 Make your own poster with Rasterbator

Click browse to choose where you want to save the .pdf file that contains our poster. After that, click Rasterbate!

You’ll see this screen.

Depends on how big the output size you chose and the computer’s speed, this process can take 1 minute to several hours. Go make some coffee, read newspaper, or watch TV. zz 11 Make your own poster with Rasterbator

We’re done rasterbating our poster. Yay! zz 16 Make your own poster with Rasterbator

Click on Close application, your default PDF reader (shouldn’t have to be Adobe Reader, any PDF reader will do. eg. foxit pdf reader, sumatra pdf reader, etc) will show up opening the poster’s .pdf file.

After that, you’ll just see a bunch of dots. What the…??? zz 19 Make your own poster with Rasterbator Don’t worry. zz 16 Make your own poster with Rasterbator Just prepare your printer, and print all pages. Make sure you set the paper size and paper orientation exactly as what you chose in the Rasterbator. Also don’t forget to check the Auto-center option. And then print them. Put them all together. You can leave the blank white margins for the sake of art, or cut them all to get a poster exactly the same as the original source image.

Here are some samples to give you a picture of what we can make with this application and our imagination. Perhaps they can inspire you to make better ones for yourself.