Printing seismic files from Petrel

Working with seismic in Petrel you will need to know how to maneuvre in Petrel to get the best settings for a reasonable quality on seismic interpretation in your exported CGM files and when printed.


Printing high resolution seismic files directly from Petrel requires more than just default settings.
The choices you have for saving as EMF are limited to an export  (Petrel -> File -> Export Graphics -> EMF), whereas save as PDF and CGM are done from the Print dialog.

Saving as EMF

Seismic generated from Petrel and saved as EMF does not offer any controls of raster sizes. The seismic has in the conversion become a low resolution raster and when zooming in the file you will see very pixelated seismic.
Conclusion:  Saving a seismic file as EMF was a bad choice if you need to zoom in or print afterwards, as you will only get a low resolution raster file covering the seismic part of the vector EMF file.

Saving as CGM

To get a reasonable output from Petrel you will need to save the seismic file as CGM.
However the process needs a little explanation as you will have to go through a number of steps.

You will not be able to save or print from Petrel before you have defined a page size. You will need to set a large canvas in Petrel. But you will still need to set the size when printing!

In the systems settings, Troubleshooting you will find that the Limit seismic bitmaps output to printers / metafiles is toggled on and set to 1000 pixels. If you toggle this off you may only see the frame printed! So change the number of pixels to something large i.e. 10000 pixels.


Conclusion: Changing the default settings will of course give you a huge bitmap/raster, with pixels enough to give you a reasonable result when printing.  You will NOT see a highly compressed seismic element as you are used to from your Linux applications, where seismic interpretations are shown as smooth curves.

Setting page size in Petrel

As your “Save as CGM” option is available from the Petrel print interface you will need to define a page size matching the size of your CGM file in this dialog in Petrel.

Printing from Petrel

Printing from Petrel often  requires a better print solution than what comes with the Windows drivers available on Windows.

EasyPlot integrated with Petrel offers you a reliable, easy to use, WYSIWYG print interface. You will get a fool proof plot solution with no size limitations. EasyPlot is easy to administer and very cost efficient.

Call one of our offices or resellers for a discussion of your need and we will be pleased to assist you with further information and assistance.

The same unique print interface is available in EasyCopy and you will get all the tools needed for cropping, high lighting, annotation, editing and montage to get your interpretations visually clear in your presentation or documentation.

If you are already using EasyCopy, EasyPlot could be a perfect companion.
If you are new to EasyCopy, you will get the best and fastest impression of the tools available by   downloading EasyCopy.