A big question that you have to ask yourself when you’re printing your photos on canvas is what wrapping type you’d like to use. The wrapping is the canvas that goes around the edge of the frame. Genius Printing offers four options, Gallery, Genius, No Gallery and Pixel Bleed.
A Gallery wrap uses the image itself to wrap around the frame. So using a Gallery wrap means you’ll lose part of the edges of your image. So you wouldn’t want to use it when someone is standing at the edge of the frame.
As you can see with this Gallery wrap (indicated by the red shading) a large portion of the image is being lost to the wrapping. In this case we are losing part of the hammer, which we want to keep as it’s the focal point of the photo.
The Genius wrap can help fix this problem, al it does is crop the image to the shape of the canvas frame. It then copies the edges and flips the onto the wrap. This gives the appearance of the image wrapping around the edges without the loss that you get from a gallery wrap.
The Genius wrap works well with the majority of images, although it does tend to have issues if there is a focal point of an image near the edge. For instance if there is a face near the edge of an image then it will look pretty odd if it’s mirrored onto the edge!
You can also just opt for a No Gallery wrap. This is either blank canvas or a colour of your choice. If you can’t find the colour that you want you can just enter the RGB numbers into the order notes.
This is just a neutral grey border. Many people may not want to use a solid border as it won’t work aesthetically with either your photo or the room you want to hang it in.
The last standard option you have for a wrapping type is the Pixel Bleed. This takes the edge pixel of the image and stretches it around the frame. It works great in circumstances where a Genius wrap won’t work.
One issue that can crop up with the Pixel Bleed is that it can tend to look ’streaky’. If that wouldn’t work for you then this isn’t the wrap to choose.
It all comes down to personal taste, but there are a few things to look out for. Happy printing!
