Sizing for Noritsu or Fuji Frontier Digital Printers

Sizing Your Full Size Files for the Noritsu or Fuji Frontier Digital Printers - how to print without have your images cropped

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Great money saving tips when using the Noritsu at Costco

Read the article in the press section about using the Frontier printer. It contains suggested work flows for beginner, intermediate and advanced users. The information is also relevant for the Noritsu printers.

This is an example of sizing for 4x6 prints assuming you want to print the full image. If you want to crop, you can crop to the exact proportions and not need this page. The same principal applies for 8x10 or 10x15 inch prints. I suggest working in pixels for accuracy. Also be aware that some of the digital printers will crop in the image by as much as 20 pixels.

Step One (below)
Size your file to 300 pixels per inch and 1200 pixels short dimension which will give you an image size of 1200x1600 pixels

Step Two (below)
Create a blank canvas (image) of 1200x1800 pixels. 4x6 proportion.

Step Three (below)
Copy the image from step one and paste it into the blank canvas and flatten the layers and Save As a TIF. Important if you are using Photoshop 7 or CS because Photoshop now supports active layers in TIF files and the digital printer can't print them properly. Also make sure to not use LZW compression because the digital printers can't read compressed files properly either.

The same principal applies for 8x10, 10x15 or 12x18 inch prints. Size your images so that one dimension is the same pixel dimensions as the desired print size and the other side falls short. That will give you a border on the two opposite shorter sides when you copy it into a blank canvas at the pixel dimensions you want to print.
An 8x10 is 2400x3000 pixels, a 10x15 is 3000x4500 pixels, and a 12x18 is 3600x5400 pixels at 300 pixels per inch. Some of the Noritsu printers are optimized at 320 PPI but my 300PPI files print perfectly on them.

It's been reported that some Sam's Club and Wal-Mart's are not printing TIF files so you might have to save the resulting image as a high resolution Jpeg or BMP. I've also heard that they're not making prints larger than 8x12. I've also been told that the Frontier and Noritsu have templates to add canvas but the operators I've spoken to weren't aware of it.

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