I am trying to model parts base off of full scale non dimensioned drawings on mylar (aircraft parts from the 50’s). I have gotten Hi-Res tiff scans of the mylars with hopes of inserting them as sketch pictures in SolidWorks. The tiff files are too large for SolidWorks to accept. I have tried to scale down these tiff files or broken the tiff files up into smaller sections. Although the tiff files look good in a tiff viewer, when imported into SolidWorks they a dumbed down and are very pixelated.

If I break up the original tiffs into 5000 x 5000 pixel tiff sections I get pretty good looking results but can end up with 50 or so tiff sections I need to import. I can live with this except after about 20 tiffs imported even with them in sketches suppressed, SolidWorks begins to bog down and run out of resources.

Has anyone found a good way of inserting large tiff files into SolidWorks as sketch pictures and maintain good quality images?