I agree with Jerl. I have a friend that does similar installations, and printing is always the nightmare.

Indesign does pretty much what you want. It will work with small preview files so the editing phase will be fine. The biggest issue with RAM will be when you output the final file, but that should be ok as long as it doesn't crash your system as you will only need to do it once or twice.

RAM will be a much bigger problem if you are doing the printing yourself (making huge prints like that is an art in itself) but less so if you are sending it out.

Agreed. Adobe is just about but not quite as evil as AutoDesk (Auto Cad software.)

InDesign or PS will definitely do the project file.

I totally agree the problem is RAM. A fast hard drive and graphics accelerator card would be helpful too.

Look at computer common computer configurations for an AutoCad station on the AutoDesk site. A similar robustness is the way to go for this project.

I hope you cranked in the cost of a computer upgrade into the project cost.

Oh, and you also discover the evil masterplan
of Adobe. Ps, Illustrator and InDesign each have
functions that are just impossible to do in any other
two.

Well, this kind of thing is usually done with Ps, InDesign and Illustrator.
Photos are edited to their final form in Ps, plain graphic elements in Illustrator
and at the end they are combined in InDesign. Make sure you use Ps -files and Ai vectorgraphics
so that the sizing in InDesign won't corrupt your pixels. Transparencys, alignment etc.
are deadeasy in InDesign and are easy to learn.

Then, find your local printhouse who does printing to surfaces like
tape, canvas, wood etc. and give them PDF from your InDesign -file. You may
also like to give them the InDesign -file because they can then edit
It to match their inhouse standards like required bleeds and cutmarks.

Learning InDesign may sound difficult but after a day with it you
find that Ui is much more fun than Ps.

willis - I can only confirm sevencrossing's words about ram. I have 16gb of ram in my box and don't have a problem with manipulating a 1gb file in pixelmator.

Nice Job. congratulations

My initial though. Does have to be in one piece? how about a collage

How much RAM do you have in your computer? with big files, photoshop needs at least 12 Gig of RAM more would be better

Look at HP and Kodak. I can not remember what the services were called but both have or at least had something that could do that. When I worked at a print shop years ago, there was a customer that always printed those types of things and we used both HP and Kodak (depending on material - canvas, paper types, etc) and they even printed them with zero seams. They had a software that was essentially drag and drop.

I'm interested to know this, as well. Would InDesign do what you're talking about?

Hey folks,

The lady just landed a design gig with one of her regular photo clients. The task is to create a mural (about 30 inches tall spanning the length of the entire office). The mural will include images of the companies clients. There will also be a handful of large mosaics (about 8 feet by 8 feet).

Stylizing the individual photos is know problem. Laying out the photos is no problem, my question is what the heck do we use to put it all together? Pixelmator \ Photoshop isn't going to do it. They tend to get bogged down with more than about 10-20 full resolution images in the same file. We want to work with thumbnails to design it, and then export it at the larger resolution (which can take as long as it needs to).

Any thoughts on the best tool to use? I've never done anything quite like this before.