Taking the perfect photo

Here are a few common areas of consideration for photography along with a little advice on how to address them when taking digital images you intend to put on canvas.

Ensuring Image sharpness

Images printed on canvas often look like they are painted, they have a fine art quality to them. The tiny indentation on a canvas can catch light at different angles, which can lighten shadow areas. With this in mind, a sharp image will remain clearer. Sometimes with a really sharp, textured print, the texture of the photo may compete a little with that of the canvas, so that’s something else to bear in mind. If you’re concerned that your image could be a little sharper, you may want to try some editing software to enhance it. You should get a good idea of whether you’d like to work on your image by uploading your image to our site and reviewing in position on one of our mock up canvas prints.

Camera stability

A shaky camera results in blurry images, which is why we often recommend using tripods to take images or remote shutter triggers, which will lower the likelihood of our image being affected by shake. If you don’t have a tripod to hand you can create a makeshift stabiliser or find a good surface to place the camera on and use a timer switch. It may be that you’re planning on including blur in your canvas, which you’d like to look that the strokes of a brush on canvas, in which case, stability may be less of a concern for you. 

Choose a high resolution

It goes without saying that high-resolution photos produce the clearest, brightest and most colourful canvas prints. Choosing the highest resolution option on your camera will give you a better resulting image for your canvas print. When you use our easy photo uploader, our clever software checks your image to ensure it’s suitable for use and will display what sizes you are able to print onto canvas in. If unsuitable, the canvas size will be greyed out, indicating that you need to choose another size or an alternative image. If no sizes suit the image, a “sorry your image is too small” message will be displayed.

 You should be able to check the resolution and size of your image in editing software. As a general rule, the larger your file size, the bigger the image resolution. We accept images up to 30MB and wouldn’t recommend working with images under 250kb for canvas prints. With resolution, it’s very much a case of the bigger the better when it comes to print work.

Basic composition tips

The most useful tip for composition is to spend time getting to know your camera and think about how you will ‘stage’ your photo. You may have one person or object that you want to focus on, but adding extra props, items or action can add interest to your image or place it in context.

Like elsewhere in art, photography rules are made to be broken, but it’s good to get to know some of the basics so that you can experiment with them and decide when and where they ought to be broken! The most commonly observed photography rule is the composition rule of thirds. Using this rule helps you produce balanced images.  To observe the rule of thirds you should imagine the area you are going to photograph is divided in three parts horizontally and vertically and place your subject at the intersection of one of these lines. To imagine this put into practice, if you are shooting a landscape, you may choose to line the horizon with the first intersection from the bottom or the first from the top.

Image compression

Each time you compress an image a little of the data relating to its detail is lost. For this reason, for best results when transferring images to canvas you should aim to start with original image files where possible, which will likely be quite large. Generally speaking, larger files equate to higher resolution images.