I've started reformatting some of my images and printing them as posters. Overall, thanks to the advice, comments, and suggestions I've received here at Caedes.net they look very good, and I'm able to get them printed at snapfish.com for about $15 - $20. If you really want to see one, you can find it here. It is a huge file (2.4 MB), though, so beware. The reson I'm bringing this up is that the captions I add at the bottom of the posters wind up showing some artifacting around the edges. I'm wondering what I can do to prevent this from being there in future versions.

I use Paintshop Pro and a freeware font that I'm adding at 66-point. This is not one of the built-in sizes (48 - 72), and I'm wondering if this is the reason I'm getting the artifacting. Likewise I'm wondering if it's the fact that I'm using Paintshop instead of the more expensive Photoshop, and also whether my use of the freeware font might be causing the problem. Has anybody else experienced this issue, and if so, what suggestions can you make?

I'm not sure of exactly what type of artifacts you are talking about but I'm guessing that it is the aliasing of the text due to too small of a resolution. The aliasing will not show up as much in a photo because it doesn't have many sharp edges at non-perpendicular angles (with respect to the sides of the print). To keep the caption looking nice I would only print the image that you linked at about 8 horizontal inches (that's close to 300dpi). To get it larger you'll have to increase the size of the matte around the photo and scale the photo using nearest neighbor resampling. This will result in the photo looking the same but the text looking much nicer.

I think I understand. You're saying that the image resolution isn't high enough to make the 16 x 20 image without aliasing showing up in the fonts. Because the fonts are scaled to fit the small image they are aliasing when I blow them up to 16 x 20, and I should try this "nearest neighbor" resampling method to smooth them out?

You almost had it correct except for the last sentence. You need to scale up the whole image (something like 6000px across for a good size print). The nearest neighbor resample is only for the photo part of the design because your can't get any more pixels of information from the photo than you already have.

I can't add to the discussion here in a helpful way but just wanted to say I looked at your poster, Regmar...very professional and well done, my friend.:Pat.

OK anti-aliasing seems to have done the trick. When I set the anti-aliasing option on the fonts, they suddenly smoothed out. Thanks for the advice.