Did you know that we offer art printing in Franklin, TN? Actually, we can print and ship your art anywhere you want us to. But what exactly do we mean when we talk about art printing? This refers to printing a photo, painting, or other kind of image, from a digital file. In other words, the digital artwork or photo can be scanned and printed on a paper, canvas, or other options. If you have something special in mind, just ask us and we can usually accommodate most anything.

You may have seen our recent post where we talked about using photos from your smartphone as a resource for home decor. Well, with that idea in mind, now we want to talk about how to get the best prints from a photo. In fact, did you know you can simply send us images straight from your smartphone gallery? We can print them directly from the email you send us. It’s that easy!

We actually print a lot of photos for our customers. But about half of the time, the image is of bad quality. Many of our customers also ask us to look at images to determine how large we can print them. So, we came up with a few tips to help you figure out if the file is good for printing. We also have some tips on how to take pictures from a traditional camera in order to get the best results.

How to Judge Image Quality

Understanding Resolution

Resolution is the key. “Resolution” refers to the number of dots that make up an image. For example, notice the Mona Lisa image here. The first image is of low resolution and made of very large pixels or dots. Thus, the image is difficult to see. However, the second image is of high resolution and essentially comprised of many more very tiny dots. So the more dots in a given area, the clearer the image will be. It will also be more vibrant and crisp. When it comes to printing, no resolution is too high. Indeed, the higher the resolution, the better the quality will be of your art printing.

You can also think about resolution like this. It’s easy to reduce the resolution if you want to make a print smaller than the “natural” size of the image. However, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to make a smaller image big.

Finding the Resolution of an Image

Using your mouse or keypad, scroll over the image file in question. Right click and select Image Properties. The size of the file is a decent indicator of the resolution. Why? Because the higher the resolution, the larger the file will be. Of course, this is not an exact science, but looking at the file size of the image can often be helpful. This is especially true if you’re comparing it to the size of other files as a frame of reference. To be more specific, if the file size on an image is less than 1MB (999KB), it’s probably not a good image for art printing. But remember that the bigger the file, the better it will be for printing. And again, no file is too large to print.

Do File Types Matter? 

When it comes to art printing at Damico Gallery, we can work with most types of files. However, the kinds we recommend for highest quality printing are TIFF, PSD, and JPEG.

How to Take Pictures Going Forward

It Still Starts With Resolution

If you have a camera, do some exploring to make sure your settings are at the highest resolution possible. Smartphones usually even have this feature in the settings. Most digital cameras provide the ability to adjust the image resolution. Just do some digging until you find it. It doesn’t even matter if your camera has a low megapixel count. It will still take the best shots possible on that camera when you choose the larger image size.

Cropping Ahead of Time

So for art printing from camera or smartphone images, make sure to crop your field of vision the way you want. Meaning, get the shot the way you want it when you actually take the photo. This maximizes the camera’s functions and settings to capture the greatest color and highest resolution. Think about it like this: if you take a picture, only to crop it later, you have then reduced pixels (dots). That reduces the file size and overall image size.

Color Profiles

Do you have a DSLR? If you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t have one. Basically, they are fancy cameras which sometimes allow you to adjust the color profile. If using one of these cameras, the profile to choose is Adobe RGB 1998. This is simply because print technology is best suited to express a great deal of this particular color space. If you don’t have one of these cameras, don’t sweat it. It’s just a cool extra feature you can use to continue ensuring quality for converting camera images to art printing.

This is really basic, but if you need more explanation or more advanced information, please give us a shout through email or the shop at 615-815-6015. We’re always happy to help out!