Canvas Prints Blog

Don’t let your holiday snaps be hidden away in a photo album, turn your beautiful memories into decorative pieces of wall art!

You can turn a small photographs that would otherwise be seen only on occasions into something that you, your friends and family can enjoy every day!

With the average person holidaying between one and three times per year, the photos soon stack up. Digital photography means that most holidaymakers can now store thousands of holiday snaps on memory sticks and personal computers, which rarely see the light of day. These photos need to be seen and appreciated, and brought back to life creatively in a range of unique home decor ideas like canvas prints and photo collages.

Save money on affordable gift ideas using photo print technology to exhibit your holiday images anew. You don’t even have to leave the house – upload your digital photos or post prints and await the results delivered to your door. In-house photo printing removes imperfections such as blemishes and red eye, then prints onto a selection of items: aprons, photo albums, mounts; even a digital photo frame key ring.

By the time you read this, you have probably been on a dozen or more memorable holidays and weekend city breaks worthy of at least one collage photo canvas. Because just one holiday photo is never enough to summon all those excursions and luminary personalities from each holiday, a pack of photo coasters can draw out the distinct character from a dozen holidays. Each time you lift your soy latte off that Greek beach vista or romantic Venetian river cruise, it will help you appreciate the finer moments in your life.

Spending two weeks on the back of a camel in northern India will normally mean your pelvis still holds as many memories of that experience as your camera does. That inimitable camel and its unforgettable breath are mostly forgotten in everyday urban existence. A wall art series of enlarged panoramic photo canvas prints will bring back that desert sensation, and is probably the closest you will get to staring in a Turkish delight commercial.

Dye sublimintation is a very simple process that provides a whole world of change to printing. It is the method of applying an image to specially coated ceramics, metals and polyester cloth, using three main ingredients: sublimation ink, heat and pressure.

Dye Sublimation Canvas Printing is the best method to produce real canvas prints – that means your print is on real woven canvas from a loom – not the plastic coated ink jet printed stuff that 95% of printers use.

Dye sublimation does not use any solvent based inks or varnishes either.

If you want real canvas prints or any dye sublimation printing then we can help you. With our factory and services operating same day despatch from London we offer you access to a leading printing service.

You can have flat prints on the canvas or other materials or framed canvas prints – ie stretched canvas over a wooden frame.

Photo prints and photo processing has come a long way in the last 10 years. At the end of the photo film era we had 1 hour prints on the high street – and yes you can still do that if you want a plastic wallet of 6×4″ digital prints – but where is the progress in that………. the humble postcard sized print just doesn’t cut it anymore!

In our London premises you can now order canvas prints on the spot and be walking off with the finished goods in less than one hour, printed and framed!

Either walk in with the digital image or photograph that we will scan and we will take your order right there and then. Alternatively just order online and choose ‘collect’ and the canvas prints will be ready for collection – no waiting around at all that way. That is a great service for a custom made product.­­

LARGE FORMAT PHOTOS ON CANVAS

We can make a huge range of sizes too. Even massive 200cm x 150cm can be made in the same 1 hour time frame. That’s a giant leap from the pack of 30 3×4″ photo prints in a plastic wallet! Order 1 hour prints today!

When you make an order with us at Photo Canvas, we give you our full attention. We want your shopping experience with us to be the best ever! Each order made is dealt with thoroughly to provide you with the highest standard.

Once your order comes through onto our system, we will check that your photo is of good quality. If we think you may benefit from a higher res image, our team of graphic designers will contact you immediately and speak with you over the phone/via email to help you create the best quality canvas prints.

Once you are happy with your image we will print it and again provide a second routine check to make sure your print looks perfect. We then hand it over to our lovely canvas men, who will create the bars and car carefully hand-stretch the canvas print over the frame.

The full product will be quality accessed one final time and dispatched to you at its highest standard.

Take a look at the two canvas prints below. Which one do you think is ours?

Can you spot the difference? The canvas print to the left is ours, very well made. And yes, companies do actually get away with selling canvases like the one to the right for ridiculous prices! When your buying canvases you really need to look out for things like wedges, sturdy frames, fabric all as well as print quality, because otherwise you will end up with a canvas that has a very short life span!

If you look closely at the two canvases above you can see the difference in print quality. The colour is much more faded in the one on the right hand side. This is because here at Photo Canvas we use dye-sublimation printers, which provides a printing process that uses heat to transfer dye onto the fabric.  A dye-sublimation printer produces true continuous tones, so if you look at our canvas print you can see the colour of the print has a much stronger appearance, much more like a chemical photograph.

Personalising canvas prints have proven especially popular because they allow you to display any photograph or other image of your choice on the wall. The high quality photo canvas uses natural canvas with no plastic coating in order to give superb image reproduction. Once printed they are stretched tightly over gallery grade frames and have spacers added to ensure the best fit and longest life. All photo canvas printing items are supplied with the appropriate wall fittings too so you won’t need to root around the shed.

Triptych Canvas Prints

For an even more striking look, the triptych photo canvas prints one single image over three canvases. Traditionally these are displayed in a row with a small gap between each picture to give a tiled effect that is both unique and great looking. While this is the more traditional technique of doing it, that doesn’t mean you have to be bound by tradition. You can opt for any display, any orientation for each of the pictures and, of course, you choose the image or the photograph.

Multi Panel Prints

What’s more, multi panel prints can use any number of canvases, not just three. You could have a single image printed on four canvases and display them in a rectangular shape or have six printed and display them in a row. Triptych and multi panel prints really do look incredible and, as ever, the choices are yours to make. If you’re not sure how an image will look when done, or you can’t determine the best crop of a picture to use then let our design team do the work for you.

The Bags Of Love Service

The Bags of Love triptych and multi panel canvas printing service can be used to display any type of image. Photographs work well because of the quality of the printing and the materials but you can any digital image as well as good quality scans or paper images. You could display your own artwork in a multi panel series of canvas prints to really show off your skills.

If you are thinking of taking photos especially for your photo canvas prints here are some useful tips:

• Always shoot on your camera’s maximum quality setting (for digital cameras) unless you’re really running out of space on your memory card. This gives you much more flexibility later on, because you can always make a large image small but you can’t make a small image large!
• Think about props, location or interesting features – if it’s of children, have you got any costumes available? Crowns, tiaras, swords! All helps to keep the subject happy and interested for the shot.
• If your camera has a zoom control use it! If you’re photographing people, either move in closer to them or zoom in. Every time you crop a digital image, some information is lost, so try and get the subject to fill the frame to start with!
• Press the shutter button slowly but firmly. Too quick a push and you might get camera-shake.
• Try using the flash in daylight! It can really help in filling in harsh and unflattering shadows.
• Experiment with shooting into the sun! This can be risky, but with the sun behind someone, there’s no glare in their eyes and the light on their face is very soft. You also get a lovely halo-effect around their head, but you might need to use your camera’s flash.
• Think about whether your picture should be portrait (vertical) or landscape (horizontal). Bags for example are landscape, the clutch make up bag and pouch purse are conveniently both ways. The small photo album it landscape, the other book covers are portrait. Canvas prints can be any way you like – how much wall hanging space have you got?
• If you’re photographing in low-light conditions, try a mini-tripod and turn your camera’s flash off. You can even rest the camera on a wall or car roof to get that perfect sunset shot, but hand-holding it will almost always end in a blurred image!
• Try and compose every picture using simple rules of composition – either divide the picture into thirds or halves. So if you’re photographing a person, try and keep their head in the top third of the frame and their body in the other two-thirds. This looks much better than just sticking their head in the middle of the picture!

Written by Paul Harmer – professional photographer, www.paulharmer.com

The same optical principle of modern cameras was used in ancient times to capture light and form images. A pinhole was inserted through the wall of a darkened room to transmit an inverted image of the scene outside. Aristotle first mentioned this technique in the 4th century BC. The pinhole was later adapted into a telescopic lens to focus wavelengths of light. At the time, this was probably the equivalent of being at a Pink Floyd laser show.

Developments in chemistry gained the ability to capture the light as a negative photograph. In the early 17th century, a photo-sensitive compound was created using chalk, nitric acid and silver to reveal darkened images when exposed to sunlight. This became photo-sensitive paper to create a permanent negative image. Unlimited positive images could then be created through contact printing from the negative onto paper. An early colour photo could be created by using a colour separation method, and three black and white photographs were each taken through a red, green, or blue filter. The artistic opportunities for using photographic images creatively began to take shape.

Fast forward to 1888, and the first Kodak camera was created containing a 20-foot roll of paper. The following year, the paper was replaced with a roll of film to eventually develop into panchromatic black and white film in 1906. The dawn of commercial colour film photography is born, leading to what would later become instant colour film and underwater photo technology in the early 1960s.

So far, we have come all the way from glorified shadow bunnies on the wall to scuba divers taking photos of manta rays. This is like comparing the manufacturers of Fred Flintstone’s stone Ferrari to the McLaren Mercedes Team. The next significant light year for photography was yet to come when in 1991 Kodak produced the first digital SLR camera. A decade later in Japan, camera technology was fused with a pared down version of the mobile phone house brick, and the svelte camera phone was born.

Out of stock? Wrong size? No ideas? Do you find yourself running around last minute frantically searching for gifts? Come on, we all do it once in a while!

STOP HELP IS AT HAND

Imagine a company that could produce personalised photo canvases for you to order, have made and ready for collection or dispatched all in the same day! Unbelievable right? Well guess what, Photo Canvas can do exactly this, any time especially for you!

For him for her, for valentines, anniversary, canvas prints, home gifts, 18th birthdays, leaving gifts, thank you gifts, the list is endless. All it takes is 5 minutes to quickly choose a product, upload your photo and place your order! Then just sit back and wait for your item to be dispatched to you. If you want to make someone’s day, trust me a gift like this will not go unnoticed!