Portrait UnionHow to choose a photo that prints well
This is what happens to a photograph after you upload it: where it is cropped, how many pixels come back, which shapes can be printed, and what a stretched canvas swallows at its edges. All of it is measured from the studio’s own pipeline rather than from general advice about photography.
The short version. A painted portrait is made at 4:5 and your photograph is cropped to the centre of the frame to get there, so shoot upright with the subject in the middle. A restoration keeps your photograph’s own proportions and is trimmed by at most 6.5% to reach the nearest shape the model can produce. The painted file you download is 2048 × 2560 pixels; a restoration comes back at about four megapixels at its own shape. A gallery canvas folds 49 mm of picture around each edge, mirrored, so nothing is lost from the front.
Choosing the photograph
Nothing downstream can add information the photograph does not have. A painting can flatter a face, and a restoration can repair the paper it was printed on, but neither one can see a detail that was never recorded — so the ten seconds spent picking the right picture is worth more than every other decision on the site.
What matters is short: the face is large in the frame, the light comes from in front rather than behind, the eyes are in focus, and nothing important sits against the edge. What does not matter is longer than people expect — the background, the clothes, whether the picture is a snapshot or a portrait, and, within reason, the age of the camera.
- Fill the frame with the head and shoulders. A face that is a fiftieth of a group photograph has very few pixels in it, and no amount of enlargement afterwards invents the ones that were never there.
- Put the light in front. A window in front of the subject is the best light most people have. A window behind them turns the face into a silhouette, and a silhouette is what gets painted.
- Check the eyes, not the picture. Phone previews hide softness. Zoom in on an eye: if it is sharp, the photograph is sharp enough.
- Keep the subject away from the edges. The crop, and then the canvas wrap, both take from the outside in. Space around the subject is what survives both.
- Prefer an upright photograph for a painting. A landscape photograph of one subject loses a great deal of its width on the way to 4:5, and what is left may not be the composition you chose.
- Bring the biggest original you still have. For an old print, that means a flat scan or a straight-on photograph of it in even light, not a phone picture taken at an angle with a lamp reflected in the paper.
Uploads are accepted as JPG, PNG or WebP up to 15 MB; an iPhone HEIC usually needs converting first. The file is stripped of its location and camera metadata and rotated upright before anything else happens to it. Ready to try one? Start a free preview, or read what the styles do to a specific subject on pet portraits.
The crop, and how to shoot for it
Every painted portrait this studio makes is 4:5 — the proportion of an 8×10 inch print, a little squarer than a phone photograph, which is 3:4. That is why the table further down charges a 3:4 photograph 6.25% to become 4:5, and why the trim comes off the top and the bottom: the phone shape is the taller of the two. Your photograph is fitted to that shape by taking the largest 4:5 rectangle from the middle of it and discarding the rest. There is no budget on that step and no warning: a photograph three times as wide as it is tall loses most of its width, and the painting is made from what is left.
That is why the advice above keeps returning to the centre of the frame. A group standing shoulder to shoulder across a wide photograph will not all survive the crop; the same group standing closer together, photographed upright, will.
The print step adds nothing to this for a painted portrait: a painting is already 4:5 and is only ever offered on 4:5 canvases, so the crop happens once, before the painting, and never again.
Check a photograph before you use it
Choose a photograph and this page will show you what the 4:5 painted portrait keeps and what it trims away, whether it still carries enough detail for the model to work from, and which canvas sizes its shape allows.
Your photograph stays on your device. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing is saved — the measurements below are made by your own browser from the picture’s width and height. Open your network tab and watch: choosing a file here makes no request at all.
No photograph chosen yet. Choose one and the measurements appear here.
Shapes, and what each one costs
A photograph has a shape before it has a size, and the shape decides what can be printed. The studio prints canvases in four families — 4:5, 3:4, 2:3 and square — so most photographs can be printed at their own proportions without losing anything at all. The table below is the table to check before you plan a wall.
| Shape | Where it comes from | Canvas at that shape | Trim to reach 4:5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4:5 | Already cropped to 4:5 — and every painted portrait we make. | 20×25, 40×50 or 60×75 cm | 0% |
| 3:4 | Most phone photographs, and a 6×8 inch print. | 30×40 or 45×60 cm | 6.25% |
| 2:3 | Every camera since film, and a 4×6 inch print. | 20×30 or 40×60 cm | 16.67% |
| 1:1 | A square crop, or an old square snapshot. | 30×30 or 50×50 cm | 20% |
Every size, in every finish, with what it costs: see the price list. Canvas starts at €69.99 and the digital file at €4.99, shipping included.
What you actually receive
The preview you see for free is deliberately small and carries a watermark. What you buy is a different file, and the two are worth separating in your head: the preview exists so that nobody pays for a picture they have not seen, and the delivered file is the one you keep.
A painted portrait is delivered at 2048 × 2560 pixels — about 5.2 megapixels, at 4:5. That is the same file whichever style you chose, and buying a canvas includes it.
A restoration is delivered at whatever the restoration model produced, at your photograph’s own shape, with nothing enlarged and nothing resampled up. In practice that is a little over four megapixels; the exact dimensions for your photograph are shown beside your preview before you pay, because they depend on the shape.
| Your photograph | Restoration delivered at | Megapixels |
|---|---|---|
| 4:5 | about 1843 × 2304 px | 4.2 |
| 3:4 | about 1792 × 2389 px | 4.3 |
| 2:3 | about 1685 × 2528 px | 4.3 |
| 1:1 | about 2048 × 2048 px | 4.2 |
DPI, with a worked example
Dots per inch is not a property of a file. It is the answer to a question about a particular print: how many pixels land in each inch of it. One file is generous on a small canvas and thin on a large one, without a single pixel changing, and that is the whole of the idea.
The arithmetic is one division you can do yourself. Take the file’s width in pixels, divide the print’s width in centimetres by 2.54 to get inches, then divide the first by the second.
40 cm ÷ 2.54 = 15.75 inches across2048 px ÷ 15.75 in = 130 DPI
| Canvas | Printed width | DPI of the delivered file |
|---|---|---|
| 20×25 cm | 7.9 in | 260 |
| 40×50 cm | 15.7 in | 130 |
| 60×75 cm | 23.6 in | 87 |
Roughly: a small print held at arm’s length wants a good deal more than a canvas does, because a canvas is textured and looked at from across a room. The studio’s own floor for a canvas is 100 DPI — below that it reads as soft, and softness is the one thing nobody forgives on something hanging in a hallway.
Which is why a canvas ordered here is not printed from the file you download. At the moment of purchase the picture is enlarged by a restorative upscaler — one that sharpens and enlarges what is there rather than a creative one that invents detail, because inventing fur is exactly the wrong kind of help — and the enlarged version is what goes to the printer. If that step is unavailable and the picture would print below 100 DPI, the order is held and tried again rather than printed soft.
We do not publish a figure for the resolution after enlargement. The studio has not measured the enlarger’s exact factor, and a number nobody measured is not worth the sentence it would sit in. What is measured is above: the file you receive, and the sizes the studio is willing to print it at.
The canvas wrap
A gallery canvas is a printed sheet stretched over a wooden frame. The picture does not stop at the front face: a band of it folds around all four sides and is stapled to the back, which is what gives a canvas its depth and why it needs no frame to look finished.
That band is 49 mm deep on every edge of every size we sell — verified against three of the printer’s own templates, and constant because the stretcher is the same depth whatever the canvas measures. The print file the studio builds is therefore larger than the canvas: the picture, plus a 49 mm band around it.
The band is not taken out of your picture. Each side is a mirror image of the strip of picture next to it, and each corner is mirrored in both directions so it meets both neighbouring sides without a visible join. Seen from the front you lose nothing at all; seen from the side, the painting appears to continue over the edge.
| Printed edge | 49 mm as a share of it |
|---|---|
| 20 cm | 24.5% |
| 25 cm | 19.6% |
| 30 cm | 16.3% |
| 40 cm | 12.3% |
| 45 cm | 10.9% |
| 50 cm | 9.8% |
| 60 cm | 8.2% |
| 75 cm | 6.5% |
The practical rule: a face or a hand right against the edge of a small canvas will appear a second time, reversed, on the side of it. Leave the subject some air. More about the canvases themselves — the material, the stretcher and the framed version.
What survives, what cannot be invented
A painting is an interpretation, and the whole question is which parts are interpreted and which are held fixed. The instructions behind every style tell the model to keep the things that make the subject identifiable and to reinvent everything else: for a person, the face, its proportions, skin tone, hair colour and hair length; for an animal, the species, the breed, the markings, the coat colour and the shape of the face. Style, light, background and costume are the parts that are free to change, because those are what you chose a style for.
Groups are counted rather than approximated. When several people are in the photograph the model is told to return exactly the same number of them, each with their own face, and never to cut a head off to fit more of the bodies in — if the heads will not fit, the composition steps back instead. The same applies to several animals, and to a person and an animal together, where each keeps its own anatomy and the animal is never given human posture or clothing.
What cannot be done is the other side of the same coin. Nothing can paint a face the photograph did not record. A subject who is a hundred pixels wide, in shadow, at an angle, comes back as a plausible member of the same species rather than as the individual you know — and no setting on the site changes that, because the information is not in the file.
Two previews arrive from one upload, deliberately different: one close and centred with the light from the front, one wider and off-centre with the light from the side or behind. They are two pictures rather than two attempts at the same picture, so that choosing between them is a real choice.
How this plays out with more than one subject: family and group portraits and a person with their pet.
Restoring a damaged photograph
Restoration is the opposite discipline to painting. The instruction is to make the smallest local repairs that reduce visible physical damage — scratches, creases, folds, tears, stains, dust, spots and damaged emulsion — and to leave everything else exactly as the photographer left it: the same composition, the same poses, the same clothes, the same objects, the same background, the same faces, at the same apparent age. Grain and period softness are kept on purpose, because a photograph from 1954 that comes back looking like a modern studio shot has been replaced rather than repaired. Colour is added in the same spirit: plausible and restrained, with natural skin tones, not a modern grade.
Where the damage hides something, the restoration blends from what survives next to it and leaves the uncertain part softly unresolved. It does not guess a feature back into existence, and a faithful result that is slightly soft is the one worth keeping.
The one thing it refuses is geometric: a photograph whose shape cannot reach one the model produces without giving up more than 6.5% of it is turned away before anything is generated. Nothing else about the photograph is judged — not how damaged it is, not whether a face is in it, not whether it is sharp. Repairing a damaged photo quotes the refusal in full, explains what to crop, and sets out exactly what is and is not inspected when you upload.
Restore an old photograph — the preview costs nothing. If the photograph you are restoring is the last one you have of an animal who has died, the memorial page explains how a restoration and a painting fit together.
Questions
What shape should my photo be for a painted portrait?
Upright, and as close to 4:5 as you can manage. Every painted portrait is made at 4:5, and a photograph that is not 4:5 is cropped to the centre of the frame before painting begins — a wide photograph loses its sides. A restoration is different: it keeps the proportions of the photograph you upload.
Will scanning my old photo at a higher resolution give a better restoration?
Only up to a point. Your browser shrinks every upload to 2048 pixels on its longest edge before it is sent, and the restoration model works from a copy fitted inside a 1600 pixel box. A sharp, evenly lit scan at a moderate resolution beats a huge scan that is soft or unevenly lit; past about 2000 pixels on the long edge, more pixels change nothing.
How large can I print the file I download?
A painted portrait is delivered at 2048 × 2560 pixels. Divide the width by the print width in inches to get the dots per inch: at 40 cm across, that is 130 DPI, which is comfortable. Canvases ordered here are enlarged before printing, so the sizes offered on the results screen are the ones the studio is willing to print.
Why does part of my picture appear on the sides of the canvas?
A gallery canvas is stretched over a wooden frame, so 49 mm of picture on each edge folds around the sides. Rather than printing a white border or repeating the edge, the print file mirrors the outer band of the picture around every edge and corner, so the sides continue the painting. Nothing is lost from the front, but anything sitting right at the edge is seen at an angle.
Can a restoration bring back a face that has been torn away?
No, and it will not pretend to. Where the damage hides something, the restoration blends from what survives next to it and leaves the uncertain part softly unresolved. It does not guess a feature back into existence, and a faithful result that is slightly soft is the one worth keeping. A restoration repairs scratches, creases, stains, dust and fading and adds plausible colour; it does not reconstruct a feature the photograph no longer contains.
Everything else — previews, payment, what happens to your photographs and how prints ship — is on the FAQ.
Try it with the photograph you have
The preview is free and watermarked, there is no account to make, and nothing is charged until you have seen the result.