Canvas Prints Blog

The day has finally arrived, just as you started to think it never would. Be it from college, or university, graduation has arrived! You have finally reached the goal and it’s time to celebrate!

Knowing friends and family we’re all there watching the ceremony while flashing away with their cameras. It would seem a shame to pack those proud memories away in a photo album. A graduation portrait on canvas would be great way to commemorate the day.

Well, if you do it right, there is a way to commemorate creatively, and at the same time, say thank you to all your loved ones that showed up to support you! Print your photos. You can get the best shots and have an endless supply of great photo presents for everyone, by getting them developed into one of the many different photo gift products. Why not try photos on canvas for the aunties? Its durable and well made and you can have it delivered as a great surprise, right to their door with same day dispatch for next day delivery. Send framed prints to mum and dad – they will be so proud.

What better way to say thanks for everything mum and dad, than to give them a cherished moment in a framed print, one that they can remember over and over. Or maybe you can get that candid shot of your little sis on a canvas print and send it to her at school. Graduation portraits can commemorate an important milestone in your life.

But this isn’t just a good gift for the family, that print of you and your best mates will look great as a photo canvas adorning your new flat. There are different sizes to choose from, you can even get multi panels like a triptych, just choose how many. Maybe you have dozens of photos but no way to display them? Turn the hundreds of memories from the last couple of years into a photo collage. Looking for the perfect parting love gift? Make another one for those roomies that are moving away to seek their fortunes. You know all those great times at uni sporting events and parties will make a great photo montage, drop enough hints and maybe mum and dad can get it for you, because after all, you got the degree and any of these products are a great college gift idea to tell the new graduate how proud of them you are.

There are so many ways to keep the memories fresh from the best time of your life. Check it out photo opportunities today and let yourself get creative!

Uploading photos to the web is very simple, but if it’s your first time it may feel quite scary, but don’t worry, below explains how it is in fact very straight forward and safe.

Saving photos on your computer for photo gifts

When you use digital cameras and phones to take all your photos, it’s amazing how easy it is for them to mount up and fill up the camera or memory cards. The natural thing to do is to copy them to your computer. The common place to put them is in ‘My Pictures’.

When you use a web site such as www.bagsoflove.co.uk to upload your photos, you are presented with an upload service. On the whole, they work with a simple page where you browse to your file and upload the photo. On PC it works like this.

You press the browse to button, locate the file in your local pc system by looking through the folders and directory listings, click on the file name, or set to view thumbnails and click on the thumbnail and then press ‘open’. When that is done the web page will display and ‘upload’ button. That button is the one which orders the transfer of the file to the web sites server computer. A progress bar usually indicates the amount of transfer happening and then when complete is usual to see a thumbnail of the image you have uploaded.

One thing to bear in mind when transferring photos is that many web sites dramatically reduce the size of the file to preserve their storage space. This is not so at Photo Canvas all transferred photos remains at the same transferred sized.

About Small File Sizes

With the advent of photo sharing sites and the wide usage of photo emailing, the providers of these services often make quite drastic changes to the size of your files. Typically a modern digital camera on standard settings will take a photo and make a file of say 1 to 2mb. If you join a photo sharing web site or use email service such as hotmail to store or send photos you will find the file is reduced in size to suit web and monitor display purposes. This is not ideal for making good print use of your photo as they reduce the files typically to 40-60kb.

Unfortunately the files that are that reduced are not really useable for printing except in small items – say purses. good and simple tip is to enlarge it to review. If you enlarge it on your screen you will see what I mean. This may be because it was emailed to you or that it was copied from web or file sharing service or maybe from camera phone. If you can find the original source file or a larger version we can make it for you with same day despatch.

NOTE to Hotmail users – attach image as a FILE not a PHOTO otherwise Hotmail will reduce the size

Do you know about our sister site www.bagsoflove.co.uk ? We make lots of smaller items like make up and wash bags – because they are smaller the image will work on them.

There are many ways to use canvas prints and digital photo reproductions to decorate your walls. This is because high quality items like those offered by Photo Canvas are more reminiscent of wall art than they are of a family photograph or a framed photograph. The photo canvas, in particular, is particularly high quality and looks stunning because it uses genuine, woven canvas and a gallery grade picture frame in its creation.

Unique Filmstrip Montage Canvas Prints

A filmstrip montage is even more unique but equally high quality. It is a fun way to display anywhere from two to seven different photographs in a unique style that can be hung from the wall in any room. The size of the filmstrip montage essentially determines the number of photographs that would prove ideal. Regardless of the size that you choose, the filmstrip montage is printed in a panoramic filmstrip style on to high quality woven photo canvas.

High Quality Canvas Print Materials

The materials used are of the greatest possible standard to ensure that the images look their best and last a lifetime rather than a few months. The frame is gallery grade and made from pine using spacers where appropriate to fully ensure that the finished canvas prints does not scratch and the image can continue to look its best throughout its life.

Montage And Canvas Options

You can choose 2, 3, 4, 5, or 7 images to be printed onto the filmstrip montage and you can choose the series in which they will appear with the first image on the left being number 1 and each one increasing to the right. In order to ensure that you upload all the images in the appropriate order you are able to make changes and save those changes, and we will always send a proof by email before we go to print so that you can make one final check to see that it will look exactly how you envisaged. Filmstrip montage canvas prints are unique, great looking, and fun wall art for your home.

Your room is missing that something, but you don’t know what it is. No matter what style your room is, a floral photo makes all the difference – it DOES!

Minimalist Floral: Ditch that dusty orchid you always mean to water! Clean cut square canvas prints depicting a single flower is a low key way of de-clutter your room décor. It can complement an existing colour scheme – or add a smash of colour, right where you need it. If you don’t want the fuss of an actual picture – one wall splashed with photo wallpaper is a beautiful enhancement to your room.

Funky Floral: Flowers blooming make for funky prints as wall décor. How about some blooming pink tulips arranged in lines and blocks for her and some charcoal lily pads featuring splashes of red for him? Flower photos don’t have to be boring, there are loads of ways photos of flowers can be taken to shake up your room décor.

Traditional: Roses are red, violets are blue, you choose the photo we’ll make it for you – relaxing pictures on roller blinds is great bathroom decor – and photos from your garden on your conservatory cushions are a real talking point…

Edgy/Urban Floral: New home gifts as floral canvas prints are a neat gift for city living. A flower photo against a concrete backdrop creates visual excitement, and a folding screen as a room divider is a nifty way to create separation in loft dwelling apartments.

Retro Floral: A normal photograph of a flower is transformed by changing it into retro pop art. Use one image on a canvas, or maybe have a square block of four in different colours?

Unique floral: You want quirky room décor? You take the picture, and Bags of Love have a team of professional artists to help you create the customized creation you have always dreamed of.

Go to your florist for inspiration, and create the room makeover you have always wanted, whatever your style…

Digital cameras have led many of us to become photo happy, taking digital photos at virtually any event and often for seemingly no good reason. The problem becomes what to do with the images once they’ve been stored on your camera. Computer hard drives will store many photographs, and there are online services that also allow the storage of hundreds or even thousands of photographs but we tend to leave our digital photos and do nothing else with them when we store them in this way.

Storing Photo Prints

Photo prints are the traditional method of viewing and storing images but there are a number of contemporary equivalents that not only look great but allow us to use more of the photographs that we’ve become inclined to snap. And if you own a camera phone as well as a digital camera then that could be a considerable number of potential photo prints. Printing them from your computer would probably mean instead of leaving them on your computer and forgetting about them you’ll leave them in the drawer and forget about them.

Photo Prints On Canvas

Canvas pictures allow you to put photo prints on canvas. Modern printing techniques combined with the high quality of digital images produced means that canvas pictures can be directly printed onto the canvas giving a superb looking, high quality print. By putting photo prints on canvas you can put them on any wall, whether that’s in your home or even your office, or you could give them as treasured gifts. Canvas photo prints don’t have to include just one image either.

Photo Collage Prints

Photo collage prints allow for many different photo prints on canvas. A professional company will take the photographs you want using and then create one or more photo collage prints as per your requirements. These photo collage prints can then either be printed as canvas pictures or using any of a number of other printing techniques that best display your photo prints. Canvas is only one material and one type of photo item that you can use too with a mass of affordable, great quality options.

There are certain moments in our lives that we would simply hate to let go. It might be a special event or a memorable occasion of some kind, something truly deserving a lasting remembrance. For these moments, a photo montage might well be an ideal solution.

Organizing your photographs into one moving sequence can help animate that very special story of yours. Photo collage is easy to make and delightful to see. With the digital photo editing technology now at hand, the photo montage couldn’t have been more accessible.

The photo album collections we all have hold hundreds of pictures that have witnessed the best and, possibly, worst moments of our lives. However, all too often their size does not match the importance we attach to the events captured on those images.

Putting them together on a photo-collage addresses just that. We understand that in this case the size does matter and the technology can make the great escape from the pocket-sized album pages possible.

Flicking through the pages of a family album it’s sometimes easy to lose the thread of a narrative, something that would’ve never happened if the story was neatly organized into a collage, ensuring that not a single detail escapes the view.

Somehow we consumers arrive at some mystifying points in our evolution that we don’t even stop to think about the products we buy. Varnished Canvas prints are one such product that needs evaluation.

Canvas printing is a legacy from canvas painting. Since the Renaissance to the present day artists paint on to a canvas substrate with a variety of paints – oils to acrylics etc. They apply the pains to a canvas historically made from cotton or linen as were the original substrates, coated with linseed to make it closed pore and then paint on top. When the paints dry a varnish is often applied to keep it firm and processed. Makes sense at every step – the traditional way. From 500 years ago!

Now in 2008 we are creating canvas printing art from peoples own photos. There are a variety of ways to print – some are older methods and some are new. The old ones are Giclee ink jets prints. This method sprays solvent based ink onto a plastic coated substrate where the ink is left to dry. The substrate is often referred to as 100% cotton canvas. This is bizarre because the plastic coating makes it only a partial cotton product – the back of the canvas in fact. The front is the plastic coated material for the ink to sit on. This is where the varnish comes in. When dry the inks are still delicate and they need to be fixed with a varnish. The varnish is solvent based too making solvent inkjet canvas prints with their plastic coating and solvent based varnishes one of the most non eco-friendly products you could bring to your home.

So what’s better then? We know no other better method in 2008 than the deep fibre printing of dye sublimation. This is printed on real woven canvas – not plastic coated. The inks do not sit on the surface of the canvas – they are fused to the individual fibre elements of the yarn of the canvas. The dye sublimation inks are water based and carry no hazardous labels unlike the solvent ink jet ones that need careful disposal (although the majority of solvent ink jet canvas printers do not adhere to the strict guidelines for disposal as the process is costly.

Since the dye sub process gets the print to the very fibre of the canvas and they are utterly stable there is no varnish required. You cannot scratch, scuff or flake dye sub prints – it is impossible.

So there you go – Varnished Canvas prints should be well and truly over for eco reasons and for practical reasons. It’s because we are stuck in our ways that the majority of people don’t realise that there are superior alternatives.

Surprisingly even well established companies with good eco credentials sell ink jets canvas prints – including IKEA, Kodak Gallery, Debenhams, Photobox, Snapfish and plenty of other retailers – who could all do better.

Canvas prints are a great way to make the most of favourte pictures. But in order to get it work as you want you have got to get the size or shape right – the aspect ratio.

You can easily size your images yourself if you have image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop. We have a list of the dimensions for all of our different frame sizes here.

So for our example lets say we are sizing for a 60cm x 40cm “gallery wrap”  framed canvas print.

Open your image in Photoshop and select the crop tool (shortcut is the “C” key)…

Then enter the dimensions into the width and height fields in the tool bar…

So for our 60×40 we will enter 67cm and then 46cm with the resolution 200dpi.

This sizing allows for the portion of the image that will wrap around the sides of the frame. Crop the image and hit enter.

You can see exactly how much wrapping you need by dragging a guide in by 3cm from each edge. The internal rectangle formed by the guides represents part of the image shown on the face of the canvas. The external border will be wrapped and not visible when canvas is viewed straight on.

Canvas photo prints represent a unique and high quality method of printing your most treasured photographs. As well as displaying family photos and pictures of the children and grandchildren it’s possible to use your own images of any location, person, or major event. Such is the flexibility of the canvas prints that they can be printed in black and white or full colour and in a huge variety of sizes to adorn any wall.

People

Got a favourite family holiday spot? Or perhaps you have a picture of the place you met your partner? Maybe you have a photograph of somewhere you’ve visited that you feel would translate perfectly into canvas prints for your wall. Landscapes and location shots are the perfect subject for canvas prints and with the quality of modern photography combined with the latest digital imaging technology you can capture and display the image for everybody to see.

Places

Family pictures and portraits be they group or individual shots, are one of the most traditional forms of home photography. Canvas prints offer a unique way to display these images and are often much more artistic and design oriented than the standard framed photograph. For an entirely unique canvas print why not consider converting a family photograph or self portrait into a modern looking pop art image; an endearing and entertaining way to brighten up your walls and display your most prized of photographs.

Design

Canvas prints can display any image you desire. As well as your own photographs, there are appealing and endearing stock images that can be used to complement your existing room design. Royalty free, stock images exist that use a variety of subjects and incorporate a varied palette of colours. There’s no limit to the possibilities with canvas prints allowing you to go as wild as you like with your chosen media.

The Flexibility Of Canvas Prints

Canvas prints come in a large variety of sizes. Instead of opting for one large print why not consider a tiled effect that spreads a single image over a number of canvases. This unique look is certain to make a positive impression on any wall and in any building. As well as variety in size and setting, canvas prints can display any photographic subject from personal photographs to industrial or even commercial buildings; ideal for your home or place of business.

There are so many ideas for what you can print on your canvas. So it doesn’t necessarily need to be a photograph; it could even be an illustration or a painting. At Photo Canvas we provide endless options. We will constantly be updating our blog with canvases we have printed for our customers (with their permission) So keep updated and check out some great ideas for canvas art!