Use the Grid and set your grid line to the amount of area you’d want to select for printing. Then using the rectangle selection tool set for Snap To Grid under View, draw your selection and crop. Then back up in the history and crop again in a different area of the grid.
You might want to consider overlapping areas so the allignment can be accurate using the move tool and viewing at 100%.
Larry Berman
Larry,
You might want to consider overlapping areas so the allignment can be accurate…
I have made a number of tiled prints from Photoshop and at first I thought it would be a good idea to have a few pixels of overlap between the separate pieces (tiles).
However, I found that when it came time to trim and assemble the tiles into a complete picture, I was faced with the problem of precisely trimming off the small overlapping zones, and I never found a way to do that.
Even when I knew I needed to trim off exactly 10 pixels, I didn’t have any way to know how much that was on the actual prints. I found no way of getting an exact match between the edges of the overlapping tiles. I tried overlapping the paper sheets with the idea of simultaneously trimming two sheets with a single cut, but I couldn’t get the sheets overlapped precisely.
The idea of a little overlap is fairly common in tiled printing. Picture Window, a third party Photoshop-like program, provides for overlap in its automated tiled image printing.
But after trying manual tiled printing in Photoshop both ways, I now trim my tiles in Photoshop with no overlap and then precisely cut off the white borders of the print using a non-slip straight edge, a self-healing plastic cutting mat, and a handheld rotary cutter. That technique lets me get virtually seamless pixel-perfect matches between the tiles.
— Burton —
Doc,
Is there an easy way to have photoshop quarter my piece and print it on multiple 8 1/2 x 11 pages?
As Larry said, there is an easy manual Photoshop procedure for doing this. Incidentally, this technique is called "tiled printing" (in case you want to do a Search) and it lets you completely escape the size limitations of your inkjet printer.
You can print a picture as 2×2 tiles (as in your case of quartering the picture) or 2×3 tiles or 3×3 tiles or 3×4 tiles or the sky’s the limit. Well, maybe your ink supply would be the limit (grin). I did some tiled pictures with 8×10 tiles, but I have come to prefer the "look" of pictures assembled from square 8" x 8" tiles, even though they do waste a little paper.
— Burton —
I was just thinking about this same thing…I was thinking of using IR to evenly slice. Would that work just as well or not?
If you do print with an overlap, just lay the images on top of one another, line them up properly and trim them both together. You get a perfectly matched trim that way.
HTH
Paul Rupp
Paul,
If you do print with an overlap, just lay the images on top of one another, line them up properly and trim them both together.
That’s exactly what I tried to do at first, because someone recommended the very same thing to me. In my experience, the "line them up properly" part turns out to be much easier said than done. In fact, I came to the conclusion that it is downright impossible, simply because the white border of the top print obscures that part of the bottom print that you have to use as a reference for the "proper" alignment. That forces you to guess about the fine details of about a quarter inch strip of your bottom image. I tried lifting up the top edge, peeking under, and letting it flip down. That didn’t work either.
I even tried lining them up on a light table so that I could hopefully see through the white paper border to the image below. In the real world, even with a very bright light below, there is just too much paper fiber texture involved to get the kind of accurate alignment that you have to have to get a pixel-perfect match. The human eye is very perceptive of any mismatch at the boundaries.
— Burton —
Burton,
I have only had to do this once and it was actually with an Auto-CAD drawing, but it worked. I agree that the borders cause problems, I trimmed them off and was able to line everything up from there.
Bottom line is, you do what works best for you.
I suppose if I had to do it again with a detailed photo, I would probably do it differently.
Paul Rupp
If you have access to Illustrator or Acrobat Pro, they can handle the tiling for you automatically.
