Hey all, I’m thinking about printing a large photo on canvas for mounting on my wall and I’m wondering if any of you have experience doing this. I want it to be something like 6’x4’. Places like Canvas Press (www.canvaspress.com) will do it but it’s ~$600 so I want to make sure it’ll work before I invest that much money. I’ll be working with a picture scanned from a 4x5 negative so it should have reasonable resolution. Is there anything I should look out for? Do you have any sites you would recommend?
I have a friend who has a company that does this. He uses a 64" wide Epson printer with “archival” inks and a huge variety of paper and cloth surfaces.
In every case, people need at least one test to make sure the image will turn out as they wish. They have a huge number of copies of the same image printed on the different surfaces, but people really seem to lack the ability to look at one picture and imagine their image replacing the demo image. Canvas absorbs ink differently than paper, and good shops will have “profiles” for each ink and surface combination, but you really, really do not know what it will look like until you see it. Every color shifts depending on the surface.
In short, this is something you need a service bureau that will stand behind the work, rather than the lowest price on-line vendor. There are a huge number of situations where the exact same thing is sold on-line and it would be silly to spend more and buy locally - this is not one of those situations.
Didn’t Haley’s boyfriend (Dylan) on Modern Family give her a large painting of them laying in Haley’s bed together, for her 16th birthday? Phil and Claire (Haley’s parents) were impressed until he said he just had it done from a photo they had taken.
Re-reading what I said, Canvas Press may well do a wonderful job. You could have them do a small version as a test to make sure it will look good first.
Printed-to-order items are my sister in law’s “go to gift”. She hasn’t done what the OP asks for, specifically, but so far we’ve gotten calendars, T-shirts and handbags. The T-shirts are the only ones which don’t really work well, because the area with the picture is very stiff; it isn’t even about womanly curves, the guys find that stiff area uncomfortable too.
The prints came out well in all cases but that particular shop isn’t very good at sizes. This doesn’t bother SiL so long as her kids’ faces don’t get chopped in half, but Littlebro used them to print some unusually-sized photographs and about blew a gasket when he saw what they’d done (instead of printing fully on the size he’d requested leaving blank spaces, they’d used the right size but left out part of the picture and the printed part wasn’t even chosen with any kind of decent aim).
I don’t think that they have canvas in stock, but KarmaKraft can handle the size that you want, I think. They will also print on materials other than their stock materials.
They do offer a “print sample” set that demonstrates their printing on their different stock materials.
The cheapest one I could find for a large photo printed on canvas was Costco. I know it sounds weird, but for a 24x36 it was $69.99. cheap and worth it.
I know a bunch of pro photographers who have used and been happy with White House.
You WILL need a print test. Your computer monitor is not calibrated to their printers. Every printer, every type of ink, and every type of print surface, will shift the color differently. I recently switched from an older 6-color Epson photo printer to a newer one, and even though they use the same inks and I was using the same paper, the color shifted slightly and I had to fiddle with the print profile and test multiple times. (Brilliant Paper doesn’t make a profile for my printer, grrr.) You will almost certainly not get exactly what you see on your screen, but a good shop will work with you until you figure out how to get it really close.
