If you are an amateur photographer you should experience one of your prints on canvas. If you are a professional photographer or printer, no doubt you have seen your work on canvas. I love the look and am fascinated with the different options for printing canvas, especially when printing for a gallery wrap. A gallery wrap is a canvas print that is stretched over a frame consisting of stretcher bars. I am sure you have seen a gallery wrapped image, even if you don’t specifically remember what it looks like. To refresh your memory, it is an image that wraps around a wooden frame and is presented without any external framing. If you can imagine a box of cereal hanging on the wall you can imagine a gallery wrapped image!

Wrap Choices

If you are preparing an image for printing that will end up on a gallery wrap you have to consider the image on the sides of the canvas. This area is called the wrap. Depending on the size of the print, the size of the wrap will vary from an inch on a smaller photo to several inches on a larger one. On a 20 by 30 image, I personally like a 2 inch wrap. You will have to decide what size of a wrap you favor when preparing your image for print.

Natural Wrap:

I think the best wraps are simply the original image that flows around the edges onto the wrap areas. I call this a natural wrap. I like this for a number of reasons. Most practically speaking, this is the easiest type of wrap to frame on stretcher bars because there is a natural continuation of the image and no artificial constructs are present that must be aligned carefully with the edges. Artistically speaking, I like the natural wrap because there is no element of change from the face to the wrap area of the print that can distract from the subject of the image. The downside of a natural wrap is that it may cause an issue with the subject of the image. If you framed your subject tightly within your viewfinder, you may find that after wrapping, an important element of the image is too close to the edge, or even worse hanging off the edge onto the wrap! This type of wrap requires no particular Photoshop effort, except remember a 20 by 30 with a 2 inch wrap prints at 24 by 34 including the wraps. Depending on the thickness of the stretcher bars, you may also want to add additional white space around the back. Remember that a two inch stretcher is usually less than two inches thick in reality.

Solid Wrap:

A solid color is added to the outside edge of the image, usually a black, white, neutral gray, or possibly a color from the image. If this is the case, your 20 by 30 would end up 24 by 34 with a 2 inch border of some color. You may need to add a little extra for stapling. The mounting of this print is crucial because nothing will look worse than a nice edge between the image and the print not being on the edge of the stretcher. Look at a photo gallery that has a solid color on their prints and see how well they stretched them to the frame. Once I started looking for this problem, I noticed it in a lot of nice galleries. Once you notice it, you can’t help but see it easily. How to do in Photoshop: To create a solid wrap, expand your canvas size and select the color extension per your desire.

Mirror Wrap:

My second favorite wrap and an excellent choice if you don’t have enough image for a natural wrap. The wrap will mirror the outer 2 inches of your image. This technique has the advantage of keeping the outer edges of the image in line with your face image, and depending on the surface detail near the edges, isn’t so picky when framing as the solid wrap. You also have the entire image of the face mounted on the face which will allow you to keep your native DPI higher because even though you are printing a larger image due to the wraps, the face image is the native image. How to do in Photoshop: To create a mirror wrap, select the outer edge of a side of your image, keep the depth of the selection equal to the depth of the wrap, copy this selection, transform to make the mirror and add it on to the edge of the image, expanding the canvas size. Do that 4 times, once for each edge of your image.

Stretching Wrap:

This type of wrap is good if you want to do a natural wrap but cannot spare enough image for a 2 inch wrap, but can spare an inch. Depending on the image, you may see the two inch wrap and not notice that it has been transformed into two inches. How to do in Photoshop: This is just like the mirror, but instead of transforming the image like a mirror, you grab a smaller depth and then stretch it using transform. For example, grab 1 inch and transform it into 2. Again, do this for all 4 sides.

Triptychs, Panels and More

Triptychs and paneled wall displays of gallery wrapped images are a popular choice when looking to create a large dramatic display. If the panels are from different images, there is no particular concern in Photoshop to prepare them. If the panels are from one image and the wrap area is not a solid color there is a special case for extra Photoshop work. In this case, if you do a natural wrap, then the image that is wrapping between the panels will not appear on the face and you will not have a continuous image. For example, you have a 20 by 60 image and cut the image into thirds then wrap, you will have 3, 16 by 16 panels. The part of the image that is lost becomes very significant when considering you are losing 4 inches on each panel and there are multiple panels. On the other hand, if you take the same image and do a mirror wrap AND when you cut the image into thirds you expand your cut size into the adjacent panel, you will end up with 3 20 by 20 panels, which pushed together will present the same image as the original 20 by 60 image! How to do in Photoshop: First create a mirror wrap to expand your image by the amount of the wrap. Next cut the image into as many parts as you want panels, keeping the width of the panels equal to the expected width from the original image PLUS two times the width of the wrap depth. From the example above the 20 by 60 should be cut into (20+4) by ((60/3)+4) inch panels. These, when wrapped with a two inch wrap, will each be 20 by 20! If you prefer to do this with a natural wrap, do the same, but skip the mirror wrap step. In this case, the face of the above 20 by 60 image will be 16 by 56 after using this technique to make panels. In other words, you will only lose 2 inches from each side of the entire image and not 2 inches from EACH panel. Have fun!

Paul