New roller banners!

We've recently started offering popup roller banners, either from your own image or designed by us. We've been working on a bunch of ready made templates which we hope are a bit different from the standard trade show banners, see more here. Prices start from £50 and banners are 800x2000mm, easy to erect and come with a carrying case.

September Canvas Competition

Our monthly canvas competition launched today and we've got a 20x30" canvas worth over £60 to give away! Take a look here.

A beginners guide to aspect ratio's.

Have you ever had prints back from your photos with areas cropped and wondered why? Nine times out of ten, this is down to there being a difference between the aspect ratio of your file and the desired print size.

At it's simplest, aspect ratio refers to the shape of your image, and how the width corresponds to the height. A rectangular print such as 12x8" and square 10x10" have different aspect ratios.

You'll find that most modern cameras shoot at 3:2 aspect ratio which is how 35mm film was shot, so when you print your standard sizes will be 6x4, 12x8, 18x12, etc . This isn't always the case though as compact system cameras such as the recent Micro 4/3 cameras shoot by default at 4:3 so check in the settings what the aspect ratio of your image is.

The original image here is shot in 3:2 aspect ratio. You can see from the thumbnails below the effect that different print sizes have on the crop of an image.

To ensure your image will print comfortably to most sizes  always try and leave plenty of room around the edge when framing your picture in camera. With the high resolution produced by modern digital cameras you should be able to adjust the crop afterwards without a noticeable loss in quality. Also, avoid cropping your image in editing software if you're unsure about print sizes as cropping general reduces the quality of the image as you're removing data. If you do need to crop, always keep an original, unedited copy of the file.

Common aspect ratio's and print sizes

3:2 - 6x4, 9x6, 12x8, 18x12, 24x16, 30x20, 36x24

4:3 - 8x6, 12x9

5:4 - 5x4, 10x8, 20x16

5:7 - 5x7....

1:1 (square) - 5x5, 10x10, 12x12, e.t.c

Canvas sizing guide

In this post, we'll show you how to go about sizing your images for a canvas using Photoshop. The version we're using is CS4 but this guide will apply to pretty much all versions of Photoshop and similar software.

First, we'll create a new document. We're going to make a 20"x16" canvas so make sure you have your units set to inches and enter this in the boxes as shown, making sure the resolution's set to 300.

Ensuring that you've got the grid turned on will make sizing and previewing your canvas much easier. In our preferences we have a gridline set at every inch.

The size we currently have on screen is going to be the face of our canvas, so we need to increase the dimensions to account for the borders. All our canvas stretchers are 1.5" thick, so we'll need to add that to our existing canvas size, increasing it to 19"x23".

Using rulers, we can show where the borders of our canvas are going to be. To do this, just click on the guides as pictured above and drag your rulers so they're 1.5" in from the edge.

Now we're ready to place our image. Just select 'Place' from the file menu then navigate to the file on your computer. You'll most likely need to resize your image so enlarge the image to fill the whole of the document, making sure you hold down the shift key to preserve the aspect ratio. Using our rulers as a guide, you'll now be able to crop the image as you like and see exactly where is going to be wrapped round the edge. We've darkened the borders in the image below to clearly illustrate the wrap.

And that's it! Now all that's left is to save your file and you're ready to order. We'll be making all our templates available to download soon and you can always get in touch if you need help with anything!