Thread: problems printing a large file (1.5Gb)

recently i have had trouble printing a 40x50 inch file on a n epson 9900 44 inc printer.
the problem is in the print dialogue of photoshop.(cs3)
when you hit print the wheel starts to spin and does not stop for about
15 minutes.then the progress bar dissappears and you are back at the start.
i have tried reducing photoshops share of the ram to 50% but to no avail

is there somewhere hidden an upper limit to the file size that the printer driver/ photshop can handle.

my machine is a mac pro quad with 32gb of ram!!
any help is appreciated
david

I'd be tempted to create a Press Quality or PDFx1-a PDF which should be a lot more compact without compromising the quality.

If you're concerned about the output quality try running a cropped version (say A4) to check before you print to the larger size.

1.5gb gulp! I'm guessing that there is an enormous print spool file required but there's simply isn't room for it either in ram or vm.

thanks Richard i will give that a go!!
a further note ,
I have imported the 1.5 gigabite file into lightroom and printed from it.
it appears to have held together.
so i am presuming my probs are in photoshop somewhere.
hopefully somebody has encountered this problem.

Hi! That's one huge file you have! We start to get concerned when the file hits the 500mb mark. Here are some of the workarounds we have for huge files.

1. Create a pdf file. With proper settings, you can reduce file size without compromising print quality. This site might come in handy http://www.pass4press.com/

2. Edit images in Photoshop, create vector graphics in Illy and assemble all the pages in Indy. But if it's only a 1 page layout with a mix of vector and raster images, we normally do it in Illy.

good luck!

Thanks Ibler i will try both of your sugestions thanks a lot!!
david

With such a huge file size, most likely you are going to need a RIP software to deal with it. I can't imagine why your file size is so big though probably you have a lot of layers. Try to flatten the image down and save it as a tiff should knock down a gigabyte off that file. Also saving as a pdf as suggested above will help a lot.