Photo Wall Art Prep

If you want to prepare your photo for being printed in a large format for your wall, here are the steps:

1. Send me an email with the info listed here and the photo attached. You’ll tell me about your project and what you need done. You’ll attach your photo so I can check it out. You don’t pay anything yet.
2. I will review your photo and request and let you know if I can resize the photo to the quality I think you deserve. If I can do the resizing, I’ll send you an invoice that you pay by credit card.
3. Once I receive your payment I will resize the photo and provide you with a link to download the photo. These photos are too large to send by email so downloading is the only way to get it to you. This usually takes about 24-48 hours after I receive the payment.
4. You upload the file to the service your are using to print the photo.
5. You get the print back, hang it on your wall, and enjoy it!

If you have a photo that you took on your phone and now want to print in a large format either to frame or a canvas print to hang on the wall, this service can help you. You may have started the process on a website like Walmart, Costco, Blacks, or another print service and when you uploaded your photo you got a notification saying that the resolution is too low to look good at the size you want printed. Or you printed the photo with a service and the print you got looks fuzzy and you don’t want to hang it on your wall.

You want your wall art to look great but don’t know what to do to make your photo match the requirements. You don’t want to spend the time and money to buy the professional software and figure out how to use it and how to add a gallery wrap so the canvas print looks stunning on the wall. You know the print will cost over $75 and maybe as much as $300 depending on how big you want the print to be and which service you use. Spending $29.99 to ensure that the photo looks amazing is a small price to pay.

Wait a minute you might say. Don’t the printing services offer this as part of printing the photo on canvas? Some may show some of these options and some may not offer any options for helping improve the look of your photo. If they do offer some of the options, you are limited to the selections they offer.

If the photo on your phone does not have enough pixels or after cropping the photo does not have enough pixels left, how can you increase the resolution so a large format photo still looks good? This takes high-end math and some fancy interpretation by software. It has to figure out how to add pixels of the correct colors in the correct spots to not distort the photo.

You will need software to do this. Can you use free software or online services? Maybe. My experience is that the results are not very good. Free software doesn’t have the best algorithms to make the higher resolution photo look crisp and clear.

Professional software has the best algorithms, math, and artificial intelligence that helps the result be much better. Professional software is not free. And it requires you to learn how to use the different options.

The software I use that is a professional package called ON1 Resize AI. You can check it out on their website at https://www.on1.com/products/resize-ai/. It costs over $100 and you need to learn how to use it, including the option to add the correct size gallery wrap for canvas prints. It creates amazing photos. If you only have one or two photos you want to print, that may be more of a time and money investment than you want to make.

The alternative is to have me do the resizing for you. For only $29.99 for one photo (and less if you want me to resize multiple photos), I will use the software and experience I’ve gained using it to print large format gallery wrap canvas prints in our own home. Every time it turns out amazing. Get started here.

When printing a large canvas photo it looks best with a portion of the photo wrapped around the side of the canvas. But you don’t want to lose a portion of your picture, especially if a key part is at the edge of the photo. The best look is to mirror that portion of each side of the picture that needs to wrap around the canvas. This way the photo looks seamless from all viewing angles.

If you don’t use the professional image resizing software ON1 Resize AI, you have to figure out how to do this manually in an image editing program. And hope it turns out correctly. That’s why I rely on the gallery wrap feature in the software. It turns out great every time.

Clarity of a printed photo is primarily measured by how many dots or pixels (two terms for essentially the same thing) the photo has, better known as resolution. The standard for clear photos is 300 dots per inch (commonly referred to as dpi). The photos we take on our phones have a resolution measured in pixels. For our purposes pixels and dots are the same thing. The newer your phone, likely the higher the resolution photos it takes.

For example, if you want to print a photo in a 12 inch by 12 inch square, we can calculate that a 3600 x 3600 pixel photo is required. For a large print like a 30 x 20 inch size, the photo would have to be 9000 x 6000 pixels.

Here’s how you can see what resolution or number of pixels a photo has on your phone.

On an iPhone, tap on a photo. Tap on the lower case i in a circle at the bottom of the screen.

This will display the information about this photo. In the middle of the screen it will list the resolution. In this example it shows that the photo is 4032 x 3024 pixels.

This photo would be good for a 12×12 square print if it was only cropped to a square because it would have over 3000 pixels in each direction. If you wanted to crop it to show only a portion of the photo it may not have high enough resolution. This photo would not have enough pixels to be sharp and clear when printed at a large size such as 30×20 inches.

On an Android phone, tap on the photo. Tap on the three dots in the lower right and tap on Details.

This will display information about the photo. Part way down the screen it will list the resolution. In this example the resolution is 4160×3120.

Like the iOS example photo above, this photo would be good for a 12×12 square print if it was only cropped to a square because it would have over 3000 pixels in each direction. If you wanted to crop it to show only a portion of the photo it may not have high enough resolution. This photo would not have enough pixels to be sharp and clear when printed at a large size such as 30×20 inches.

The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of width to height. It is quite common that cropping a photo is required to match the aspect ratio of the size of print you want. There are a few common aspect ratios that are used: 2×3, 3×4 and 4×5 being the most common. Most large prints will be in one of these aspect ratios even though the dimensions are much larger. For example, an 18×24 print has an aspect ratio of 3×4 (divide each side by 6).

You can crop the photo yourself on your phone so that you choose the exact portion of the photo you want printed. Make sure to select the correct aspect ratio when cropping. Save the photo as a copy so the original photo is not changed. Send the cropped photo in the email to me.

Alternatively, you can send the photo as is and I will crop it according to the instructions you give me. I will only crop from top/bottom or left/right. I won’t crop in both directions because I don’t know what you want to focus on in the photo. My cropping is just to have the correct aspect ratio for the larger image. If you want to select the cropping area yourself it is best that you crop the photo on your phone or computer.

This article from Apple explains how to edit a photo on your iPhone, including cropping. This article from Google explains how to edit a photo on your Android phone, including cropping.

Close up photos of people, like portraits, don’t usually resize well. The software does a good job with scenery and landscapes even if there are people in the photo at a distance. But skin tones are hard for the software to get right so it doesn’t always work well for portraits. That’s one reason I don’t ask you to pay for the service before I’ve seen your file. I don’t want to promise something that I can’t deliver.

No, we don’t print the canvas photos, we only prepare the file. That allows you to select the service that you prefer, whether that is local or online. Some popular canvas print services include:

• Blacks.ca (the Canadian service we’ve used for all our canvas prints)
• Walmart.com or Walmart.ca
• Costco US or Costco Canada

Whichever service you choose, pay attention to the specials they often offer. We regularly see 40% discounts and occasionally even more. This can save a lot of money if you are ordering large format prints or are ordering a number of canvas prints at the same time.