Use your typical budget home printer to print a poster for your wall – amaze your visitors with our detailed guide on different methods you can use!

Do you want to print a poster at home? That would mean dealing with standard everyday paper sizes such as Letter or A4, tiled in a way to form a poster.

With the rise of technology in printers, we all get an obvious increase of printing quality even from relatively cheap printers at home.

At the same time, photos resolution and quality has also increased; as a result many of us own photos of spectacular detail. If those photos were printed on a typical photo size or on a typical sized paper such as A4 would seriously lack potential.

However, printing large images (such as architectural designs) would require a plotter or printers that are unsuitable for home or even office use – which means the person would have to bring their image in a USB flash drive and pay at specialized printing stores for this service.

Can I print a poster at home?

Yes, you can! That’s where tiled printing comes handy – it allows us to print a large, finely-detailed photo or image on multiple papers of a particular size – for example multiple A4 sheets. Later on, we can assemble and combine into one tiled image, essentially in a poster form.

The options one would have to facilitate such printing are numerous. However, not all of them are handy, easy to use or convenient. For example, Photoshop can be used to convert the image to allow tiled printing, and it can actually be done really fast – but not all people are knowledgeable enough with Photoshop to do it. Besides, Photoshop is a paid software and its cost is not insignificant.

On the other hand, there are other image editors which are available for free, for example IrfanView (for home use). Nevertheless, no-one would bother to download an image editor software for this purpose only. Especially if the thing they need to do is something that can be done with existing, pre-installed software in Windows.

Print a poster using Paint!

True! This kind of image manipulation to enable tiled printing is something you can do in Paint! Just follow our steps.

1. Make sure the printer is connected to the PC and turned on. It would be ideal if you could run a test print to make sure the printer is in good state; that would mean proper alignment and good ink levels.
2. Select File> Open and choose the image you wish to work on.
3. Select Print> Page Setup. In the Scaling section, the option that we need to adjust is the Fit In X by X pages.
4. Now, it all depends on the image dimensions and the paper you intend to use. You need to calculate based on the paper and image dimensions, how many pages you would require in order to fit the image fully in the pages. If you have no clue, start with Fit In 2 by 2 pages.
5. Visit the option Print Preview. Scroll through the pages to make sure the whole image is contained within the number of pages set up in the previous step. If parts of the image are not visible, adjust the Scaling option accordingly.
6. Now it’s time to adjust the margins in Page Setup. With the actual poster now in mind, decide how big the margins of the pages should be for the best result.
7. You are ready to print – make sure that you have selected all the pages, the proper paper and inks are installed in the printer and proceed with the printing.

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Print a poster using Blockposters.com

If you are into a more “automated” method, without the guesswork that you need to do in Paint, then you can use BlockPosters. This is a website which is free to use and built with tiled printing as its sole purpose.

It actually cannot get any easier than this:

1. Browse to your image and upload it to the website.
2. You can see the image you uploaded, and you have options at the right. Select how many pages the poster will use for width. The corrugated lines indicate the separation between the pages.
3. Select your orientation and the type of paper you use, such as A4 or Letter.
4. Choose among Bordered or Borderless design – your printer documentation will inform you about the particular settings for margins.
5. The page will inform you of the final size of your poster – then click Create!
6. The website will generate a PDF file that you can download and print.

Things to keep in mind about BlockPosters:

• It is free for up to 5 pages wide, and will provide a watermarked poster. If you wish a larger poster or to remove the watermark, you need to pay a fee which at the moment of writing is 5 USD.
• By uploading your image, you are actually giving your image to the BlockPosters server. Technically, anyone from the BlockPosters staff can see it, so refrain from doing it if your image is personal.

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Print a poster using Rasterbator

Another method you can employ to print a poster at home is by using Rasterbator. This is another online tool which offers more options that allow for an even better visual result when your poster is done.

The steps you need to follow:

• Click on Create Your Poster
• Provide the website with the URL of the image (if you found it online) or browse and upload your own photo.

• Adjust paper type, size, orientation and margins. Also, choose how many sheets of paper your poster will take in width.
• In Style, you can setup various visual effects – choose No Effects if you do not wish to alter the image in any way.
• If you have selected No Effects, skip the Color tab, because it will be useless to you.

• Select between 5 different options for how the image enlargement will be done – if unsure, choose Simple enlargement. Besides, you can always experiment with the other settings if the output poster is unsatisfactory.
• The rasterbation is occurring. If you feel that you enjoyed the service, consider to donate to the creator to cover up for server and assorted costs.
• Within a few moments the page will ask you to save the PDF file which contains all the papers of your poster.

Where could tiled printing be useful?

Tiled printing can be useful for way more prints than decorational posters. For example, people dealing with crafts would employ it on photo transfer on wood for woodcarving or for decoupage.

Other examples include needleworks patterns that you can purchase online – most often they follow standard pages sizes, but sometimes the pattern is simply too big to print at a regular printer. Also for rough architectural designs, office and public places decoration, and more.

Have you ever used one or more of these methods to print a poster at home? How did it work out for you?