To create a really good canvas print from your photographs you first need to think about the type of image you are going to use and what type of shape canvas you are going to produce. Landscape or portrait formats are usually the format digital pictures are produced in so pictures can readily be produced as canvas prints in this format. Little editing is usually needed to prepare a print for printing. Many subjects work well in this style, from landscapes to family groups or intimate portraits, However, often by cropping the image to focus on the key elements and remove unnecessary or distracting elements you can create a more powerful image. This can mean you create a square picture rather than an oblong one. Square formats work particularly well if you have a set of related images to print. Long thin panorama prints work well for cityscapes and landscapes and can be great for more abstract ideas. Another approach is to take a single image and split it into a set of smaller canvases that together make up one complete image. This works well for natural forms and some landscape or sunset shots can look stunning in this format.

Labels: canvas prints, panorama prints, portrait prints

What size print can I expect?
Mobile phone cameras, especially earlier ones produce quite small pictures with less than 500 pixels in width and can usually only be blown up to around 16cm by 12. They are designed to produce good snapshots and were not meant to be create much larger prints. Three or four mega pixel cameras produce file sizes that allow prints up to approximately 24 inches and to produce much larger prints requires larger files still requires a photo with thousands of pixels. To produce a large canvas print 90 cms wide requires at least 3600 pixels which an 8 to 10 mega pixel camera can provide. However the mobile phone camera image size continues to increase and more recent phone have up to 8 mega pixel cameras in them which can produce large canvas prints.

Labels: canvas printing, canvas prints, larger prints

Why is this important
If you go too large with a small photograph the resulting canvas print can be pixelated or blurred and produce a poor print. To avoid this before considering a photo for a canvas print you ideally need to find out how large it is. By how large we mean how many pixels it contains. Once you know how many pixels, which are usually recorded as xxx wide by xxx high you can work out how big a print you can get. Most image editing software contains the information you need. As a rough guide find out the number of pixels and divide by 100 this will tell you roughly how big you can print in inches (a picture 1000 by 1000 pixel can be printed 10 inches by 10 inches). To find this out depends on the image editing software you use. In Adobe Photoshop you go to the menu for image and click on the image size tab from the drop down list. Here you will find the following, the width and height of the picture file in pixels, the overall size in megabytes of the picture file, the resolution of the picture file and the current dimensions of the print it would produce. Quite simply the more pixels the better.

Labels: canvas prints, digital printing, image size, large prints