Dave's Favorites: Make Poster-Sized Prints With Wall Photo Maker

When it comes to "supersizing" your digital photos, your options have typically been pretty limited. You could buy a costly wide-format inkjet printer to make 13-by-19-inch prints, or send your image file off to an online photo printer for 20-by-30-inch posters.

OreWare.com's Wall Photo Maker offers yet another alternative: Tile your picture across several ordinary sheets of paper. The end result can be so large that you could cover an entire wall with your favorite photo.

Wall Photo Maker is one of those one-trick ponies that is easy to use because it has so few options. Just load your picture and specify three parameters: the final dimensions of your poster; the overall image quality, which will vary depending upon the way it's enlarged; and one of eight image editing effects like brightness, smoothing, or blur. You can specify the poster size in pixels, inches, feet, or--the most useful measure--pages. Dial in a grid of 3 by 4 pages, and you'll see tiles appear in the preview that indicate how it'll print.

After the sheets come out of the printer, you cut away the white borders around each image, line them up, and tape them together. I found that Wall Photo Maker over-prints each tile, so you'll get the best results by trimming each sheet by hand. With just a little effort, I printed 6-by-3-sheet panoramas that had no visible seams.

You can try Wall Photo Maker for free, and the full version costs $20. Download it from OreWare.com.