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Have you ever wanted to take some of your fabulous family memories, your photos, maybe
a business chat, maybe a PowerPoint presentation and print it out in such a way that it becomes
a permanent canvass that you can hang on the wall but thought it's just too expensive?
Well, this is a really cool website that solves that problem. It's called Canvas Discount
and we've been using them for years. And the main cool thing here is it's just so cheap.
You can see right now they have a sale on an 8x8 print for 12 bucks, down from 34. And
if you go into their formats and prices section here, you're going to see a whole lot more.
For example you might want one here, that's the Logic Canvas or maybe one of their Panoramic
Canvases.
If you sort of compare these, let's say there's a 30x30 inch canvas. Here we are, Google print
canvas 30x30, let's see what the prices are. Here we are in shopping. $237 that can't be
right. $185, $136, $185, that's what I've seen, a couple of hundred bucks. Even at Walmart,
or somewhere we think it could be super cheap.
So how do you actually do this? First thing you do is you actually select a size, let's
just do a small one for now. This is one of those 8x8 inch, great size. And it shows you
the minimum resolution here. 305 pixels each way. So let's get one going. To do that we'll
upload a photo, we'll need to create you can see here a super small type, a jpeg or a png
or a gif which are easy to do if you have something like a Photoshop.
So let's create on o these things from scratch. Remember 8x8 inches. All we do is go to Photoshop
in this case create a new image that's 8 inches by 8 inches, you can see I've set this up
already, and I think 300 dots per inch is a great resolution. This is clearly more than
the minimum they recommend. And then all you do is bring in an image from your camera.
In this case it's an image of my daughter Belle looking fairly cute in pink. So all
I got to do here is scale the image in Photoshop until I like it. Move it until I like the
framing. So maybe like that and save it out as a jpeg which I can easily do and just call
it Bella. And of course Photoshop deals with jpegs and pngs and all that kind of stuff.
All you can set the quality level here which I'll set at the maximum of 12. So now I've
got an image that's exactly precisely right. Back over to Canvas Discount. Choose that
image. To do that, we go to the Desktop, there's Bella and we upload it and it's 3 megs so
it's going to take a second to do. We've got a pretty fast connection here so it'll probably
be there quite quickly.
You can see down here that you can pay with anything. I generally use PayPal because it
has that extra level of security and you can have it delivered by FedEx.
So now we have a square image which honestly is big enough for quite huge images here.
But let's just tell it that what we want is that 8x8 and you can see over here on the
side it starts to make decisions. For example the way it has it right now is the edges are
going to be smooshed back against the canvas which we don't want. So we're going to change
this thing here that says Border Option, and we're going to say stretched so as soon as
we do that it changes this at top so that the very edge of the border gets stretched
out as a pattern. If you have it done like that, you can have it for example, to be black
or something like that. I like the stretched one honestly. It looks hip.
And what you can also see here is you can add a bit of money for a couple of other options,
I never choose the options, and I never choose the digital face. Right now this thing is
12 bucks, I dig that it's 12 bucks. Now if I do 4 or 5 of this I'm hitting the $50 mark
and what you can see is at the top here, free shipping on orders over $55 so what I would
basically make sure you do is get enough of them either the small ones or the medium size
ones so that suddenly your shipping goes to zero hit the checkout and it shows up at your
house generally speaking within a week or so. And you can see up here that you can generally
print it within 24 hours.
So I just want to say that we've used this a lot. Found it to be incredibly helpful.
I highly recommend it to you Canvas Discount. By the way, we got nothing to do with these
guys. But I think it's a really helpful service. We printed 50 of these things and then populate
the walls of our homes. Enjoy! I hope it helps you out.