Why Not Create Your Own Canvas Art?

Create your own canvas art!

While our designers are constantly busy creating new designs for our canvas artwork, from floral pieces to sweeping landscapes, geometric shapes to pop art, one of our most popular services is the ability to make your own photo on canvas. Photos on canvas not only offer a unique way to turn your photographs or digital designs into top-quality wall art - they are excellent gift ideas, and a beautiful way to immortalize an important event, place, or thing. Which would you rather have - photographs of your wedding, or a series of photos turned into true artwork mounted on canvas prints?

Our designers can take a standard photo and twist, tweak, and edit it to your liking. Any modern digital camera has resolution high enough to be able to increase the size of the photograph drastically, and is perfect for mounting on relatively large sized canvas. This, coupled with the fact that we use only the highest grade materials and professional mounting techniques, will ensure that your photographs and designs turn out exactly the way you want them. We can even add various effects, from glamour shots to pop art newspaper pointillism, to achieve the desired look. There are virtually no limits to the type of wall art you can create with photos on canvas, and our experience combined with your creativity will end in a piece of artwork you won't forget.

Canvas artwork offers a new and exciting way to create your own memories, but there are other uses as well. For example, we have been commissioned by a variety of professional photographers for gallery prints, as canvas provides a subtle texture and a unique look for photographs. If you want to display your work in a different way than many photographs provide, canvas prints are a great alternative.

Regardless of the effect you're looking for, photo on canvas's malleability when it comes to style provides an excellent way to get your work to look exactly the way you want it to. Our canvas prints are very reasonably priced, and are built to last. They come coated with a museum-quality protective that makes them glossy and durable, with water and light resistance. The next time you want a way to turn your photos and artwork into true wall art that will be genuinely eye-catching (and liven up virtually any room), consider using canvas artwork.

Canvas Prints From Your Photo

Canvas Prints From Your Photo

Creating your own photo on canvas can be significantly harder than people think. While the art itself is not always particularly hard to produce with modern technology - any image can be printed on canvas and mounted - the actual process and cost of printing, buying, and framing a canvas print is extremely difficult, and leaves little margin for error.

In fact, one of the most frustrating sights any artist or would-be artist can see is an image on canvas with a big rip or stretch mark in it. In this article, we’ll go over how you can go about ordering a print for a surprisingly low price, and avoid all the hassle and stress of trying to do it yourself.

The array of options for making your own photos to canvas are truly astounding. Sending in a standard photo to be made into a piece of canvas art will allow the artists to edit your image for color, sharpness, contrast, and anything else that will help your image really stand out in your home.

Options for black and white photos also exist, and for that ancient photo look, vintage sepia (or warm sepia, if you really like sepia). Glamour portraits will allow the artists to airbrush out imperfections in skin and hair tones, touch up lighting, and soften and sharpen focus where necessary.

Vintage pop art, in the style of artists like Andy Warhol, is also available in canvas art form. Send in a photo of a friend or loved one, or even of yourself, and the artists will turn it into a stylized version of the image you might expect to see in the New York Museum of Modern Art.

They can also convert it to a modern pop art feeling, with bold color contrasts and blending. The artists can even dot mesh it for a pointillism look, where standing across the room produces an image out of pixels that make no sense up close. Your photos can also be converted and spread across three canvas prints, to be hung independently and spaced apart, producing a unique effect.

There are several photo wrapping techniques for the edges, as well. Canvas prints allow the creator to stretch the image around the frame itself, creating a unique look for landscape photos or abstract art. For these and more approaches to personalised canvas art, have a look around our website, where there is surely something to pique the interest of virtually anyone.

New Photo On Canvas Page

We've now updated the photo on canvas to include some exciting new options.

In addition to the standard colour and black and white options, we've added two sepia types, three new pop art types and a Glamour Portrait service.

There are interactive previews showing before and after images, giving you an idea of how your image will look in a particular style.

If you're looking for a photo on canvas supplier, rely on Canvas Republic to get the very best from your photos.

All You Need to Know About Sending Us Photos

As you can imagine, we're sent lots of photos every day and we're used to working with a range of images. Because of this, we are sometimes a little guilty of taking for granted that our customers know exactly what and how to send files to us!

One of the main concerns our customers have is whether their image is of sufficient quality to make a good canvas print. The image files we receive come from many sources, including digital cameras of all types and scans, and so vary in quality enormously.

Generally the larger the image, the better the print. Most images from digital cameras are much smaller in size than the canvas print they will be made into.

Unfortunately, judging whether an image will make a good quality print at a certain size is not as simple as just checking the file size. Many factors in how the image was created and how it was subsequently saved affect the overall quality and suitability for printing...

File Type: The format in which the file is saved. Formats such as JPEG use compression, which is a method for making the file smaller and easier to send.

Compression: The greater the compression used, the lower quality the image. Some types of compression give better results than others. High compression is easily recognised as blocky "artifacts", especially at the edges of detail in the picture.

Resolution: The total area or pixel size of an image can be expressed in a number of ways. You may see images referred to in sizes such as 1280 x 1024, which is the height x length in pixels. Size can also be measured in real world units such as inches or centimetres.

DPI: Dots Per Inch is linked to the image size. It refers to how much detail is saved per square inch of image. 72dpi is the standard for images that should look good on a monitor or the web. However, a 6 x 4" image will print smaller than this at 72dpi. Therefore, the standard DPI for printing at full size is 300dpi.

Interpolation: As most photos aren't as large as the desired print size, or at 300dpi, they must be enlarged. Digital enlargement requires the computer to stretch the pixels in the image apart, and then fill in the gaps with 'guessed' pixels.

Most popular graphics software is capable of interpolation, although most give unsatisfactory results at anything other than minor enlargements. This is because of the quality of the guesswork when filling in the extra detail depends on the quality of the interpolation software.

Imagine taking a photo of a book from a foot away. The book would fill the frame and even with a modest camera, you would be able to read the pages of the book. Now imagine taking another photo of the book from 20 feet away. The book would now be a tiny part of the photo and you wouldn't be able to read the words.

A piece of software like Photoshop could stretch the blurry, tiny book so it was the same size as in the first photo. However, it would have to make an approximation of what the words should be, which wouldn't be as accurate as taking a nearer photo.

This is why we ask our customers to leave any enlargements to us, rather than use software like Photoshop to artificially enlarge the image to a bigger size. We use specialist interpolation software to obtain the optimal result possible from the original image.

To complicate these quality issues even further, many popular photo album and email programs apply their own compression to images, reducing them in size and quality for easy sending.

As a quick rule of thumb, images over 1mb in size should give a good quality print at most canvas sizes. However, for a more accurate assessment, you can always send us your image so we can let you know whether it will be work as a Photo On Canvas...

Canvas Art Edge Types

One of the options on our Photo On Canvas product is edge type. This refers to how the sides of your canvas print are finished.

Perhaps the most popular option is the full Photo Wrap. This is when a portion of the edges of your image make up the sides of the finished canvas print. Photo Wrap really enhances the three-dimensional effect of canvas art.

When processing your image for photo wrap, we take into consideration whether there is anything important at the perimeter, such as a face. Many photos are taken close-up, and if this is the case, it can mean that a forehead or a chin may be wrapped around the sides of the piece; something that most find undesirable! If this is the case, a photo wrap may not be possible.

An alternative to the Photo Wrap is to have Solid Edges. Here, the photo only makes up the front face of the canvas, and the sides are made a solid colour such as white, black, grey, etc. This option also gives the piece a classy, refined look.

Visit the Photo On Canvas page to find out more...

How to Choose a Photo On Canvas Supplier

Now that it's possible to create a professional looking artist canvas from your own photograph using modern printing technology, personalised canvas products are becoming much more widely available.

What was once a rare and expensive product has become much more widespread, with many canvas art suppliers and photographers offering the service on the internet for low prices.

But what sets them all apart? Will the end result look the same, and does it matter which supplier you choose? These are questions we often receive from our customers, and we know that not all photo on canvas services are equal!

Obviously it would be expensive and impractical to all the suppliers out there, so we thought it would be useful to offer a guide to choosing a quality product, including the kind of questions you should ask a supplier.

Of course, once we've armed you with the information you need to make an informed choice, naturally we hope that you'll choose Canvas Republic for your Photo On Canvas!

The key to choosing a great supplier and product is assessing the information they provide and asking the right questions. The best suppliers of personalised canvas art will provide full details of the materials used and how your image is processed. When assessing the materials the supplier uses to create the personalised print, you should judge using the same criterior that you would when choosing any canvas art.

Frames should be of the adjustable stretcher frame type, as opposed to the easily-warping, DIY cut-timber variety. On the larger frame sizes, the stretcher bars should be 'finger-jointed'. This means that rather than being machined asof one long piece of wood (which will be prone to warping), the frame is made of several tightly jointed lengths of wood. This means that the finger-jointed frame will resist bowing and warping, keeping your print straight and squared. Further details on the frames, as well as the canvas we use can be found in our Quality Guide.

The other main factor in creating a quality photo on canvas print is digital processing of the original image. Many factors in the computer processing stage can affect the overall quality of the print, such as how the image is colour managed, and how well the original image is retouched for sharpness, colour, exposure, contrast, etc.

Perhaps the most important point affecting print quality is how the image is interpolated, or enlarged. To scale a digital camera photo up to a large canvas size can mean interpolating by 1200% or more. Imagine stretching a postcard up to the size of a billboard poster.

This is a huge enlargement and means that any flaws or quality issues in the original image will be amplified and made worse, resulting in a blocky or bad quality print.

To enlarge, specialist interpolation software should be used, rather than a common graphics program. Programs such as Photoshop aren't designed to handle interpolation at these percentages. Ask your photo on canvas supplier how they will interpolate your image.

As with other canvas prints, you should check how your supplier will colour manage your image. It is also important to calibrate your monitor, as this will ensure you are viewing consistent, neutral colour on your screen. Good colour calibration helps a printer achieve a consistent result, going from your image, then onto computer, and finally to onto print.

You can find further information on the importance of colour management, and how we implement it on the Quality Guide.

Canvas Republic Team Up With Samsung

How does that mobile phone on your desk look? A little tired maybe? Not exactly the aspirational trophy it once was? Never fear! Canvas Republic have teamed up with Samsung on the launch of their new G800 mobile phone ...



With the G800, you can get even closer, with a sleek mobile camera that actually looks like a camera (lens cover and all.) The moments in your life worth remembering deserve to be captured. That's why the G800 is equipped with a 5mp camera sure to capture your moments with superior color, quality and clarity.

To celebrate the virtues of this amazing new phone, Samsung are offering a free Canvas Republic Photo On Canvas with every G800 purchased from an O2 store!

Click here to find your O2 store.