Adding full color photos and illustrations to large vinyl banners will create banner designs with greater impact and a more high quality appearance. Adding a full color photo to your display banner is often the easiest and best way to do this.
When you intend to add a photo or image to a vinyl banner design, you should keep a few things in mind. For the image to look clear and crisp it really should be saved in the correct resolution. For most large display projects such as popup displays, vinyl banners, window graphics and graphic backdrops, try to keep resolution at about 100 ppi (pixels per inch) at full size.
In other words if you have an original image that is 300 ppi at 8″ x 10″,then you can appropriately increase its size about 24″ x 30″. That will give you a finished resolution of 100 ppi. In fact you can often use as low as 50 ppi and still be quite satisfied with the output, because these images are usually meant to be viewed from a distance of at least 10 feet away.
Second, it is often necessary to brighten up the colors of your images. You can usually do this by increasing the contrast. If you use Photoshop the easiest way to do this is by “pinching” the levels. Open the levels control window and pull the control for the shadows towards the middle (to the right). Then pull 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 mid tones.
You can also brighten your photos by “sharpening” them. Your images will normally appear much crisper and sharper when you “punch them up” with a bit of sharpening. But don’t go overboard.
Last but not least, it is best to work in CMYK mode instead of RGB. Vinyl graphics and other large format graphics are just about always printed on CMYK printing machines with solvent inks. If you input RGB images you will be relying on your printer to convert them to CMYK. This is often not as reliable as converting them yourself before sending the images down to the printer. RGB can often be somewhat misleading since it can display more colors than can be printed by CMYK.
There are colors you can see on a computer monitor that you simply cannot reproduce with CMYK inks especially not with solvent based inks on a medium like vinyl. You really should be aware of this before you get the printing done. If it is necessary to have a specific color and if time permits a proof can be printed on the actual vinyl banner material to show you how it will look.
Another important point to be aware of is that the choice of ink will impact the durability of the job. Outdoor projects should be printed with true solvent inks because they are ideal for full color printing that will be used in bright sunlight or other potentially harmful weather conditions such as rain or snow.
Solvent inks resist fading due to UV exposure, and stand up to wind and rain much better. Non solvent inks will fade much more quickly in direct sunlight. Even for projects intended for indoor use it is often better to use solvent-based inks because they produce a much more durable final result. This is especially important for applications like trade show banners or event backdrops which will likely be rolled and unrolled many times, and be subjected to a lot of handling.
For more tips on trade show graphics and displays contact the large format printing experts at TradeShow-Display-Experts.com
- Richard Hendershot
Highlights 
January 9th, 2008 