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In 2025 Photoshop has no easy way to slice a photo at 300 dpi and save each for commercial printing?

Forum|Forum|7 months ago
July 28, 2025
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Every tutorial on slicing suggests SAVE FOR WEB. Why? I need high-res output of a sliced image to print on canvas (divided by three to save on printing and shipping). Can someone suggest a simple way to divide a tiff or psd file into sections to send to my commercial printer? Thanks.

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Correct answer Stephen Marsh

@PHughes3

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PHughes3Author

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Thanks to everyone here who tackled this question. Yes, it is for canvas printing of a 36x72 inch photo divided into three 24x36 inch panels in order to save lots on printing and shipping. I actually spent the weekend rolling through everyone's post and I am saving the thread for future reference. I run a small photo sales business through the ETSY platform after 20 years in commercial & wedding photography. I have been an avid Photoshop user for many years but never needed to do any tiling or dividing of an image. Through testing various suggestions from all of you, I made it work! THANK YOU! Original 36x72 and resulting 3 panels are attached.

Stephen Marsh

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PHughes3Author

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Thank you, Stephen. Obviously I didn't need to worry about bleed as for canvas, I just needed a finite cut(s) within the full 36x72. Great help from everyone and good reference for future needs.

Stephen Marsh

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@PHughes3

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Gord@APL

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This is not something I'd want to even attempt in Photoshop for the purpose of commercial printing. The fuss involved in taking into account things like bleed for each part would end up driving me nuts.

As @Conrad_C suggests, tiling in another application would be the best way forward, as the application will do the heavy lifting for you. If your commercial printer can work with PDFs, they may even prefer to tackle the tiling themselves.

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/acrobat/kb/print-posters-banners-acrobat-reader.html

Conrad_C

Community Expert

I thought about bleed, but my reply was long enough already. If we want to bring up bleed, then first we have to ask @PHughes3 what kind of print this is going to be…

If the three prints are intended to be assembled into a single larger seamless print, then you are correct, bleed must be taken into account to allow overlap without gaps. If that’s the goal, what I would have changed in my demo above is to enlarge the single-tile document dimensions and frame size by the bleed amount. Or, as you said, put it into other software that can tile with a bleed. But because PHughes3 is sending it out and not printing it themselves, a simple Tile feature in a Print dialog box won’t work; that software has to be able to save or export the tiles to the specific file format the print service provider wants.

However, it is also possible that all PHughes3 wants is a common and simple triptych, three different mounts hung together like the ones in the picture below. In that case a bleed might not be needed, just print and mount the sections. What I showed is perfectly suitable for that.

A third possibility is that they’re ordering a triptych mounted as wraps, with the prints going around the edges of their mounts like the ones in the picture below. In that case, we’re back to needing a bleed, but this time around all four sides of each of the three images. This bleed wouldn’t necessarily have to be done by the user if the printing service has an easy way of achieving the wrap by scaling up each image, or by mirroring or artificially extending the content that wraps around the edge.

So again, it all depends on what kind of mounting this is headed for.

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Every tutorial on slicing suggests SAVE FOR WEB. Why?
By @PHughes3

The reason why is because when the word “slicing” is used, a web search thinks it’s about HTML slicing of web graphics, so it will lead you to the Slice tool. But even for web design, slices are kind of an outdated technique; today it’s better to use CSS layers. So if you’re doing web design today the Slice tool is probably not really what you want to use any more anyway, and for a print document it never was the right tool.

For print production, the traditional term for this is not “slicing”, it’s “tiling”. Several Adobe applications have a Tile option in the Print dialog box. Photoshop doesn’t, but you’re not printing it yourself anyway so keep reading.

For your purposes of high-resolution print, you can use any technique that will divide the image into three equal parts. If you don’t use a script there are still some semi-automatic ways to do it. For example, if you were printing it yourself, you could combine setting the Rectangular Marquee selection tool to the Fixed Size that you need, and move it across the canvas for each section, each time selecting the Print Selected Area option in the Print dialog box.

But you’re not printing it yourself, you’re sending the images to a commercial printer. There are several ways to do this in Photoshop, but here’s one that doesn’t take much effort:

(Note: I edited this reply to replace this demo, because I found a way that’s simpler than the Guides + Crop tool method I showed here earlier.)

1. Make sure the document equals the paper size for each section. My sample image is exactly 3x the width of US Letter paper.

2. Drag the Frame tool to create a frame that’s the same size as the document.

3. Add the image. I dragged it from Bridge and dropped it into the frame, but you can also drag it from a folder window on the desktop.

4. Duplicate the document. For a triptych I made a total of three copies of the document.

5. In the Layers panel, make sure the frame layer content is selected (outlined), not the frame itself.

6. Use the Move tool to drag the image so it’s properly composed within that tile.

7. Repeat step 5 and 6 for all documents.

8. Save the documents, and send all three to the printing service.

This might be enough if you don’t do it very often. If you need to do it all the time, a script would be a lot less work, or you might be able to record an action that reduces the canvas width by 33% from a different anchor point in each of the three documents…I’ll have to try that sometime.