Originally published in Trade Show Buzz

Adding full color images to vinyl banners will create banner designs with more impact and a more professional appearance. Putting a full color photograph on your vinyl banner is often easiest way to do this. When you want to add a photo or image to a vinyl banner design, try to keep a few things in mind. In order to look crisp and clear an image must have the correct resolution. At America-Banners.com we try to keep resolution at about 100 ppi (pixels per inch) at full size. In other words if you have an image that is 300 ppi at 8" x 10", then you can comfortably blow it up to about 24" x 30" (which will give you 100 ppi). In fact you can probably go as low as 50 ppi and still be quite satisfied with output, because these images are normally meant to be viewed from a distance of at least 10 feet away.

Second, it is often necessary to brighten up colors of your vinyl banner images. You can usually do this by increasing contrast. In Photoshop easiest way to do this is by "pinching" levels. Open levels window and pull shadows (dark shades) control towards middle (to right), and pull highlights control to left. This will brighten your light colors and darken your dark colors while getting rid of some of "mudiness" of mid tones.