Why is a poster so appealing? Maybe it’s because a poster is more than a photo.  It is something that captures life in greater width and height. That’s why posters also easily become keepsakes.

Growing up, I had to buy my posters and the larger the size, the higher went the costs. I also managed to create a few self made ones, but they were more of collages, a glued up motley of my favorite images.

We didn’t have the tools for the job that could help us make our own posters. But thanks to software, now stitching together a poster is only about getting the image right. The ink and paper costs are there but the software does the poster personalization.

PosteRazor is a free software that easily helps you make your own posters at home. All that you need is an idea, the PosteRazor freeware and a standard color printer. PosteRazor is open source and a really small download at 484KB.

Poster lovers can check out a very early MakeUseOf HowTo: Free & Huge Custom Poster For Your Wall article that shows how to print out sections of a large image on standard size paper, and assemble it all as a huge poster.

PosteRazor also takes a Raster image as an input file and cuts it into pieces that can be printed out using a standard sized printer. The cut pieces can then be assembled into a complete poster by gluing the edges together.

What’s simple about PosteRazor is the wizard that has just five steps from the starting image to the finished poster.

1. Browse to your image and load it into PosteRazor. The original dimensions of the image file are indicated in this window.



2. Defining the paper size that your printer can handle is the critical part. The decision to fit the paper to the image or the image to the paper has to be made here. A few standard paper sizes are available from the dropdown. Alternatively, you can opt to go for a custom size.



3. Overlapping margin areas are needed for gluing the pieces together. Overlapping positions are for side by side borders of the divisions that will tile together in the final poster.



4. Defining the final poster size is choosing between a fixed size, panning it out over multiple sheets, or increasing the original size by a percentage.



5. In the final step, the poster is saved as a multi-page PDF file.



A PDF file is a universal document format and can be opened by a reader in all OS. Image color types also can be maintained across computers.

All that’s left now is the labor of printing the sheets out and assembling them together with glue on the overlapping margins.

As a simple tool to make your own scaled posters, PosteRazor has a few plusses going for it like its easy portability, very simple interface, and compatibility with Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. It also covers a large number of image formats like – BMP, DDS, Dr. Halo, GIF, ICO, IFF, JBIG, JPEG/JIF, KOALA, LBM, Kodak PhotoCD, PCX, PBM, PGM, PNG, PPM, Photoshop PSD, Sun RAS, TARGA, TIFF, WBMP, XBM, and XPM.

Creating posters is something you may not do every day. But if you find an image that you would love to turn into a poster, it helps to know about tools like PosteRazor that are just a download away.

Would you like to create a poster (or do you stop at the ink costs)? Which is your favored poster app for the task?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

• (18)Wordle – Become Addicted To RSS Feeds The Fun Way
• (9)Update To Google Picasa 3.6 With Photo Geotagging
• (43)Top 5 Free Websites for Quality Copyright Free Photographs
• (3)Top 5 Black & White Image Search Engines
• (13)The Challenging World Of Image Editing