ACK! Graphics Help

[rockislandmike]

I'm wondering if someone has some good ideas.

I'm working on some 53' reefer trailers for my layout, based on those of the company I work for (Lilydale Foods here in Edmonton). Somehow I managed to get my hands on the original graphics that go on the side of our trucks (see below for a quick photo I took).

My problem is that each of the graphics is a 500MB+ tif file, and I'm having a heck of a time getting them down to a manageable size so I can print them out as a decal off my inkjet.

Regardless of where I copy it into first (I've tried coreldraw, photodraw, publisher), the computer just hangs up and won't let me shrink them to move on to the next stage.

Any suggestions ??!?!??!?!!?

 

[belg]

shrinking

Mike I;m not a computer guy so this maybe a stupid answer, but I shrink alot of my stuff using a blank word document.

 

[ezdays]

The first thing that comes to mind is how much memory do you have, and what are your virtual memory settings? The virtual memory should be set as permanent and be two to five times the size of your RAM, so you might try increasing that. A 500 meg file is extrodinarilly large and would bog down any machine. I'm guessing the graphic is at 100% and is printed out in sections or on one giant plotter.

That being said, you might try waiting a lot longer for the file to load. I have a CAD program and sometimes customers send me a file with a lot of detail and it is full size (like an airport terminal). They sometimes take mor than a few minutes to load, even though I have a 1.7 gig processor and 512 meg of RAM. The machine appears to be hung up during this time. I have a very slow laptop with limited memory and I once tried to open a simple CAD file and it took over 1/2 hour to load.

Could you go back to your source and maybe get them to open and reduce the size of the print, and possibly even converting it to a jpg, thereby reducing the file size.

Just a few first thoughts. Keep us posted.

Don

Don

 

[ezdays]

Belg,

That's a good way to do it, but I think what Mike is saying is that he can't get to the point that his file will open because it is way too large. I left a few suggestions and thoughts in the thread he started.

Don

 

[jon-monon]

If you would like, you could snail mail it to me on CD and I could try to shrink it on my Super Dual CPU Atom Smashing Machine. It may take a while, but I'm pretty sure it will work. Linux machines don't lock up

 

[Russ Bellinis]

I'm probably just demonstrating my ignorance here, but could you divide the graphics up into sections? Perhaps if you cut out the "Sandwich" you could reduce that to scale, then do the lettering and the logos separately. If you were to buy a decal for that trailer commercially, you would have to cut the decals apart because the manufacturer would print them to maximise the use of the paper.

 

[RailRon]

Russ,

the problem for dividing a picture into pieces is, that you have to load the whole picture in the first place - and that's exactly where Mike is stuck.

Mike,

do you really have to use the original graphics? The picture you posted looks very good to me. Since you see the real thing every day I have another suggestion:
Why not take photographs of the trailers in your yard? Of course the lighting should be good and the trailer should be clean (like on your pic). For that length of the trailer take two or three photos as squarely as possible.
If you photograph on film, you surely can get the pictures on a CD from the processing firm. In this case the pixel resolution is more than sufficient for a H0-sized copy.
Finally you paste the pics in a graphics program together and then you're set for printing out your decals.
Just a suggestion...

Ron

PS: This reefer trailer really looks good - hope it finds his way to your layout!