Proportions and Cropping Pictures for Canvas Wraps
You can’t put a “square peg”in a “round hole”
It’s important that you understand how your photos need to be proportioned when choosing the size and orientation of your canvas wrap. There are traditional photographic sizes. Most 35 mm cameras take photos that would be proportional to a 12 x 18. That means if your photo was proportional to 4 x 6 it would not be proportional to 11 x 14 or 16 x 20 and some cropping would be needed to have your image fill all of 16 x 20 or 11 x 14.
To complicate matters even more, we use deep stretchers (1.5 in) to frame the picture with, and that actually creates a net loss from the front view of 2” . Look at the picture above. You can see how the main focus of the photo is affected by the 2” used for the vertical wall of the wrap (this is the opaque area).
In this example the original picture ( 1 ) was sent to us as digital file at 16” x 10″ at 72 dpi. The customer wanted a canvas wrap with the dimensions of 12” x 12” – image ( 3 ) To accomplish this we re-sized the original image to approx. 8” x 12”. We then cloned parts of the image to add 2 inches to each side of the picture to make 16” x 16” as seen in image ( 2 ). This gives us an extra ½”on all sides for trimming. You will notice in the highlighted area in picture ( 3 ) there is 2 inches added for our custom manufactured 1 ½ “stretcher bars.
