question about prints, would like advice from photography/photoshop savvy people

[213041284s]

I'll try and make this as short as possible

 

Some of my all time favorite albums don't sound so great on vinyl unfortunately. I've decided it would be more sensible to sell them off and use the money to expand my library and opt for better, mostly cheaper alternatives like CDs, SACDs, blu ray audio and all that good stuff. With that said, I would like to retain some of the experience that comes with listening to vinyl. I recently had the idea to get some photo prints done so I can have them on display when listening to the albums. 

 

I've recently downloaded some high quality JPGs to use for the prints. They're each around 1200 x 1200, which I figured seemed like a decent size for what I'm looking to get. However upon browsing through articles and forums I read that 1200 x 1200 is pretty much the bare minimum for 12 x 12 prints, and that in most cases the quality will be shoddy at best. I'm currently trying to teach myself a bit of photoshop ( I know absolutely nothing about this kind of stuff) to see if I can improve these images, but I had some questions:

 

• I noticed that those discussions about 1200 x 1200 being low quality mostly referred to photographs taken from cameras. However, since this is an album cover that was probably produced differently, does it really make that much of a difference?
• Will it make any real difference whether I keep it in JPEG format or convert it to something like TIFF? again, I'm not quite sure if the same rules apply to here as they do to photographs (probably a dumb question). 

and lastly

• Has anyone else undertaken a similar project before? how'd it turn out? The local Kinkos and Office Depot either won't or don't do copyrighted images in the sizes I need. the best alternative I've managed to find to far is Persnickety Prints. For 1.99 a print, I figured it's worth the risk, but if anyone knows of any other places that a bit more tailored to this sort of thing, that'd be cool.

 

Thanks!

[BuzzersonKillwell]

It won't matter if you save as JPEG or TIFF since you don't have the original. Open a photoshop file and set it to 150dpi at 12" x 12", from there you can see how many pixels you need to get a crisp image. 150 is fine for a digital print from a place like Kinko's or similar.

Most places like Kinko's will print on a 12 x 18 sheet but the printer won't print full bleed so you're looking at 11.5" of art per sheet. You may find that printing oversize (larger than 12x18) increases price. No idea about the legalities.

[Guest]

You could always get one of the digital photo displays/frames, and set that up to display the album your playing.

[213041284s]

It won't matter if you save as JPEG or TIFF since you don't have the original. Open a photoshop file and set it to 150dpi at 12" x 12", from there you can see how many pixels you need to get a crisp image. 150 is fine for a digital print from a place like Kinko's or similar.

Most places like Kinko's will print on a 12 x 18 sheet but the printer won't print full bleed so you're looking at 11.5" of art per sheet. You may find that printing oversize (larger than 12x18) increases price. No idea about the legalities.

 

Thanks man! that definitely helped. I've just finished working on the covers and I think they look alright now. I'll call up Kinkos anyways to see what my options are, if not I'll just get them done through that other printing place.

 

 

You could always get one of the digital photo displays/frames, and set that up to display the album your playing.

 

I was thinking this too, but right now I'd like to start small and do it for a few albums only. I can't justify the prices just yet, but I may later on down the road.