Choose, Crop And Finish Your Photo

As the price of high-quality canvas printing drops, we're finding that more and more people are choosing this medium over traditional prints to display their favourite photos on their walls. Our aim with this article is to help you to best choose and prepare your images so that you'll be absolutely delighted with the results you receive back from us at Your Image 2 Canvas.  

Obviously, we'll be happy to print any image you send to us, but here are a few tips that will help you focus in on your best shots:

Make sure that they're sharp - perfect focus helps your images to pop out of the canvas.

Sharpen in post - because canvas inks bleed during the printing process, it's helpful to add quite aggressive sharpening to your post processing workflow.

Watch your borders - framing is crucial, and having stray items like branches or people encroaching into the frame distracts from the main subject.

Choose WOW moments - a canvas is a statement piece on a wall, so make sure the photos that you choose are your very best.

Whilst it's generally preferable to frame your photos as correctly as possible while shooting, it's also true that most images will require a slight crop to maximise impact. If there’s a lot of dead space around the subject it's a good idea to crop in tighter. As you can see in the image of Noah below, a quick crop has created a much more effective picture without losing the sense of space.

You may have noticed that during the crop of the above image, we moved Noah over so that he's closer to the 'third'. As mentioned in a previous article, the rule of thirds is a great place to start when placing your main subject in the frame, whether that's a person, flower, the horizon or your favourite pet.

If, however, you're planning on printing to a very large canvas, you'll want to save as many pixels as possible for maximum resolution, so choose images that require the minimum of cropping in these cases. 

We’re happy to print your pictures with any aspect ratio or custom size you wish, which gives you some freedom to either be creative with your crops or use one of the standard print sizes.

As well as giving you the opportunity to crop online, we also allow you to change your image to black and white or sepia with our range of filters. Both of these filter options look fantastic printed large on canvas and add a touch of class to the finished product.

The final decision you need to make before ordering your canvas is whether you want a wrap or not. The two most common options are a gallery or white wrap, but we also offer a mirror and custom coloured wrap. The gallery wrap extends the image around the edge of the canvas, whereas white leaves the edges pure white.  The mirror wrap option mirrors a portion of your image from the front to fill the edge, and our custom colour wrap allows you to select any colour from the provided colour wheel.