WTF is image resolution and WHY does it matter ?

Seriously though, WTF is up with image resolution and what does it even have to do with your canvas order?

You might think we’re being needy and annoying when we ask you to ‘meet our image requirements’ by limiting the size of your image submissions. In reality, we put these restrictions in place because we don’t want you to end up with a sh*t looking canvas. Real talk.

The key to scoring yourself a great looking canvas is to use a good quality image with a high resolution to begin with. Alternatively, you could try buying the canvas loads of drinks and connecting with it emotionally, but that doesn’t always work…

It’s 2012, so if you don’t the basics about image resolution now is a good time to learn! Let us make you marginally smarter with this quick breakdown:

• A digital image is actually just a bunch of really tiny dots (or pixels) squashed together in a certain order to make a picture. The number of pixels in an image make up the resolution of the image.
• The resolution of an image is often measured in ‘PPI’ (pixels per inch) or ‘DPI’ (dots per inch).
• Pixels are important because a high resolution image with lots of pixels is going to look a lot better once we blow it up on to canvas for you. The more pixels you have, the better!
• The physical dimensions of your image are almost always going to be far less than the physical dimensions of a canvas, so the pixels that make up your image need to spread out to make up for the extra space.
• If you don’t have enough pixels, things start to look blurry, distorted and pixelated.

Now that we’ve covered the ‘what’ and ‘why’, lets talk about how to get your hands on a high resolution image and what you should avoid!

• Avoid pulling images directly from the internet, particularly places like Facebook, UNLESS you know the image meets our image requirements.
• Web images are usually really small because they need to load quickly. If they were big they would take forever to load and use up all of your internet. Web images are for the web! Not for the wall. *UNLESS (see above).
• When you’re trying to pick an image for your pixelpaint canvas, we recommend using something that has at least 300 PPI. If you want to use personal images, check the size first! Images from your phone probably aren’t going to cut it, especially for the A1 and A0 sizes, to be brutally honest with you. Be realistic people!
• Make sure your camera is set to a relatively high resolution, again, 300 PPI is a good place to start. You won’t need to go any higher than that unless you’re shooting for an A0 canvas or larger.

A good way to check the size of an image is to save it to your computer, open the image, right click it, select 'properties' from the drop down menu, and look for the resolution or pixel dimensions in the window that appears.

You may have noticed in our image requirements, we talk about ‘megapixels’. If that sounds foreign to you, read this FYI: one megapixel = 1,000,000 pixels. To work out how many megapixels your image is, take your pixel dimensions and times one by the other! Too easy!

So to summarise;

1. The resolution of an image refers to how many pixels make up the image,
2. The higher the resolution is the better
3. Don’t use images from Facebook
4. Always check that the size of your image meets our image requirements.

Got it? Good!