What Type of Photo Should I Choose to Print on Canvas?

The short answer is whatever you want! You have that special photograph of a person, a place, a pet, etc. that you want to have printed on canvas for all the elegance canvas lends to an image. But, you wonder if it will work.

Most companies printing photos on canvas use the gallery-wrap method for stretching. This means that the image will wrap completely around the stretcher bars and the canvas will be stapled to the back. This leaves clean, staple-free sides of continued image, precluding the need for a frame - ready to hang! In order to gallery wrap, the subject of the photo needs to be enough in the center of the image so there is unimportant area on each side (top, bottom, right, left) to wrap around the stretcher bars. A photo of a person or group of people where faces,heads and the like are right to the edges will create some problems.

There are different size stretcher bars but the two most common sizes are.75 inches wide and 1.5 inches wide. The width of these bars determines how far the canvas sits off the wall. Whatever size bars are used, the printing company will need at least that much extra image on each side to facilitate a successful wrap.

If a photo is deficient of this extra image surrounding the subject of the photo, there are a couple of choices to fix the problem. Depending on the nature of the image, it may be possible to extend the extra image area to accommodate the needs for wrapping by cloning the image or by mirroring the areas in question. Again, the nature of the area must be suitable for either of these methods.

Another way to get around the lack of extra image is to print the image only to the face of the canvas. This method still allows the canvas to be wrapped to the back for clean, staple-free sides but the image will not. You would have a choice to leave the sides white or have a color added. There is a bit of a down side to this method due to the fact that canvas does stretch and there will inevitably be some bleed over to one or more sides, however, this bleed over is usually negligible. The canvas print company will make every effort to keep the image aligned to the edges but, as it is imperative that the canvas be very taut, that need will supersede alignment and there will nearly always be some degree of bleed over.

Of course, beyond the placement of the photograph, there are considerations for resolution and image quality that will effect the outcome of the canvas. But that is a whole other subject. Suffice it to say that you would want a photo that has high resolution and least compressed image quality. Printing your photo on canvas not only extends the life of the image (typically for 100 years!) but gives it a life that paper just does not come close to, frequently making it look like a fine oil painting.

You will want your canvas print company to not just print your photo as received, rather, you want one that will see all that your photo is and can be and will do all it can to make the transfer successful. So choose your cherished photo and enter the classy, elegant world of photos on canvas. You will be very glad you did!