Making Large Canvas Photos

We absolutely love our dog Chester! I didn’t have any cute photos of Chester hanging up in our home. I thought about printing some large prints and framing them, but then I had an even better idea! I decided to make some large canvas prints. They were so easy to make and order! I had Chester sit in front of our white wall in our hallway, snapped some pictures of him on my cell phone, and lightened them up with the “Snapseed” app on my phone. We do have daylight lightbulbs in our hallway and I had them on when taking the photos. These type of lightbulbs take the “yellow/orange”/warm tones out of the lighting. They are great for taking photos!

This is what the initial photos looked like, before I lightened them.

I used the white wall for my background so that I wouldn’t have to photo shop anything out of the photo. The white wall made for a great neutral backdrop.

Chester is so good when it comes to modeling! I ask him to come and he comes, sits, and gives the best poses! He’s such a sweet pup. I answered lots of questions that I receive about Chester, here.

When I had the poses chosen for the photos that I wanted to enlarge, I opened the “Snapseed” app, uploaded the photo to the app, and began lightening them. I tapped on the “tools” section on the app, then “tune image”. There will be lots of options in the “tune image” section. I brightened, increased the highlights, and decreased the saturation…sometimes decreasing the shadows helps too. After I saved those changes, I tapped on the “details” section in “tools” and increased the sharpness and structure a small amount. It takes some “playing around” with the tuning and details to get the look you desire. There are also different filters that can be used on the “looks” section. I love the “bright filter” in the “looks” section.

The app also allows you to save filters in the “looks” section. This is nice when you want multiple photos to look the same. After you save your filter with the plus sign at the end of the “looks” filters, you can go back to it and use it for your next image that you would like to look the same. There are lots of lighting/filter apps out there. I’m sure that a lot of you have your favorites. This is the one that I have used the longest and am the most familiar with.

After I had the lighting/coloring of my photos the way that I wanted them, I uploaded them to “Nations Photo Lab” and had them printed on wrapped canvas, with white border, in size 24×36″. I wondered if they would be fuzzy because of changing the lighting in the app and enlarging them so much, but they turned out gorgeous! There are many photo labs out there, I just happened to choose this one for this project, and I love how they turned out! Printing photos/canvases out at your local print shop may be even more budget friendly.

I hope this helps answers a lot of the questions that I get about these large photos of Chester! I’m so glad that I printed them on wrapped canvas! It’s a great alternative for a photo and it comes with a hanger on the back side.

Yep, Chester pretty much owns the hallway now. At least he thinks he does.

A pet shrine is a great idea, right? When I first hung these up, I think that Chester wondered who the other 3 dogs were.

I would love to hear if you have a designated area for your pet/pets. I hope this inspires you to make some art for your pet space, or any other space!

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