Thread: How Can I Make My Own Cut Out?

The problem is not with the programs, it is with the printing. To do a life size cutout, at the very minimum, you will need a color printer 24-26 inches wide and then have to glue that to cardboard.

Try Kinko's or one of those places.

Programs aren't the problem so much as what you're going to do the printout on. If you want, you could just do multiple pages off of a standard printer, but it wouldn't look as good because you'd have to overlap them. If you want a single, solid printout, then you're going to need a bigger printer--unless you want to blow a few hundred bucks minimum, it'd be easiest to just go to a copy shop and have them do the printout for you.

As for the picture itself, your biggest problem will be resolution. On a computer monitor, 76 dpi is fine. In fact, that's about the limit of most displays, so higher dpi doesn't matter. But when you're blowing it up to life size, you need some SERIOUS resolution increases.
Now, I've got a nice digital camera that my mom uses as a digital arts teacher at her high school. It's pretty high-end, 13 megapixel if I remember right, though it could only be 11. If I set that up and take a picture, it'll give me a nice, extremely high-resolution picture, but nowhere near high enough to blow up to life-size.
The only way I can think of to do that would be to take several pictures and collage them together. Otherwise it's just going to be a pixelated mess.
Program-wise, use Photoshop. It's really the only option for photo editing and management. The CS3 beta just came out too, it's a free download, though it's limited to a two-day trial unless you play around with it. Specifically, if you go to Program Files/Adobe/Photoshop CS3/AMT and change the name of the file application.sif file to application1.sif or application.sif_ or basically anything but it's original name. After that it'll run without asking to register or all that jazz.

EDIT: Dang, I left my post and went to answer the phone, came back and posted but Seeker beat me to it.

Yea so pretty much i want to just use my own printer and not necessarily on the EXTREME settings for quality...

I figured out that about 1 page equals 1 face in Paint...

Any ways i could measure out arms without trial and error (trying not to use a whole lotta ink in the process)

Okay, before this goes further, I think I need a general idea of what the purpose is. I thought you wanted a realistic looking cutout, but if you aren't going to be worrying about quality, you can cut some corners.

Basically, I'd still go with multiple images spliced together. Apparently you don't need too much quality, but there's a line between "low quality" and "blob of pixels". So stand very still, and have somebody use a digital camera to take at least five or six pictures of you, focused on different segments of your body.
This is important: DO NOT USE DIGITAL ZOOM FOR THIS. If you have optical zoom, feel free to use it, but digital zoom does nothing more than crop the image, so it defeats the purpose.
With each photo, be sure to hold the camera close enough that you only get what you need (which is a picture of you) and not much of what you don't need (background junk).
From there you can move two directions:
Low Quality--Just printout the images straight from the digital camera, and splice them together by overlapping pages. This is low quality because the sizes will be screwed up relative to each other unless you're very careful and more than a bit lucky taking the pictures.
High Quality--Upload them into Photoshop (seriously, MS Paint won't cut it for this), splice them, resizing if necessary to make them match. Split them again into page-sized segments, adjusting resolution up or down to increase or decrease the size to your desires, and print.

Thank you for all your advice...

Im going to bed soon but i will try this tomorrow

Hrm...just played around with the idea with a picture of myself, and on second though, two, maybe three pictures spliced together should be sufficient if you've got a 5 megapixel or better camera.