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Adding full color photos and illustrations to large vinyl banners will give your banner designs with greater impact and a more professional appearance. Putting a full color photograph on your display banner is often the easiest way to do this.

When you want to add a photo or illustration to a vinyl banner design, you should keep a number of things in mind. For the image to look crisp and clear it really should have the correct resolution. For most large display projects such as popup displays, vinyl banners, window graphics and graphic backdrops, a resolution of about 100 ppi (pixels per inch) at finished size is sufficient.

In other words if you have an image that is 300 ppi at 8" x 10",then this image can be blown up to about 24" x 30". That will give you a finished resolution of 100 ppi. In many cases you can probably use as low as 50 ppi and still be quite satisfied with the output, because these images are usually meant for viewing from at least 10 feet away.

Second, it is often necessary to brighten up the colors of your vinyl banner images. You can usually do this by increasing the contrast. In Photoshop the most effective way to do this is by "pinching" the levels. Open the levels control window and push the control for the shadows towards the middle (to the right). Then push the highlights control to the left. This has the effect of brightening your light colors and darkening your shadows while clearing up some of the "mudiness" of the middle tones.

"Sharpening" your images will also have a brightening effect. Punch up your images with a bit of sharpening and they will almost always appear crisper with greater impact. But don't overuse this technique.

Finally, we recommend working in CMYK mode rather than RGB. Vinyl graphics and other large format graphics are just about always printed on CMYK printing devices using solvent inks. If you input RGB images you will be relying on your printer to make the conversion to CMYK. This is often not as reliable as doing the conversion yourself before sending the images down to the printer. RGB can often be misleading since it has a broader color "gamut" than CMYK.

What that means is that there are colors you can see on a computer monitor that cannot be reproduced with CMYK inks especially not with solvent inks on a material like vinyl. You might as well know this before you get the printing done. If it is necessary to have a specific color and if time permits a proof can be produced on the actual vinyl banner material to give you a clear picture of how it will look when printed.

Another important point to be aware of is that the choice of ink will have an impact on the durability of the job. Outdoor projects should be printed with true solvent inks because they are ideal for full color printing intended for use in bright sunlight or other potentially harmful weather conditions such as rain or snow.

Unlike water-based inks, solvent inks do not fade as quickly when exposed to UV rays, and stand up to wind and rain much better. Non solvent inks will usuallyfade much faster in direct sunlight. Even for indoor projects it is often better to use solvent-based inks because they produce a much more durable final result. This is especially important for situations that require graphics which will be rolled and unrolled many times, and be handled a lot.