If you have a picture in an album or a printed photograph someone has given you this can still be used as the basis for some digital art. These will need to be scanned to create a digital file.

Scanning it yourself

How you go about this will depend on the make of you scanner and software used. The following general pointers may be useful:

• Make sure the glass bed of the scanner and your picture is clean and dust free. An imperfections and particles will show up particularly when blown up large.

• Choose a high resolution for your scan this is usually measured in dots per inch or DPI . Ideally 1200 or higher if this is available and certainly at least 600 is desirable. The larger the DPI the bigger the print we can produce from your file

• In the preview window ensure the scanner is only going to scan the picture by selecting the edges of the picture with the marquee tool. Otherwise you will create a scan of the bed of the scanner as well as your picture and create a very large file as a result.

• Save the scan as a jpeg since this will automatically compress the file to a smaller size but retain the same number of pixels

Once you have a digital file you can order your print in the usual way. The facility to either upload your image or sent it to us by e mail or on a CD is built in to the order process. Alternatively if you want us to have a look at your picture before ordering please use our upload facility to send us your digital file and a message and we will contact you and let you know what can be achieved with your picture.

Have us scan it for you

You can use the online ordering process to order a canvas or poster print the size you want in the normal way. When asked whether you want to upload your picture choose the second option and send us your image by registered post . We recommend this method to ensure your precious images get to us safely. The address is on the footer of the home page and is repeated on the confirmatory e mail you are sent after every purchase from the site.

Labels: digital printing, image size, resolution, scanning

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