A gallery wrap is a canvas print stretched around the outside of a wood frame. You can see an example below.
Preparing a photo for a gallery wrap is tricky because part of the canvas is visible along the sides of the frame. Enlarging the photo to go around the sides is usually not a good option because that may cut off important parts of the image. You could leave the sides white or a solid color, but that’s not very interesting. A trick that often works well is to reflect the image around each edge of the frame. That gives the illusion that the photo extends around the frame.
All this can require tedious algebra and Photoshop fiddling. To make it easy we provide a free Photoshop panel that does it for you. Our panel handles a variety of options. In the example below, we used our panel to reflect the photo around the edges, fade to black, and blur.
The gallery wrapper panel is installed with Blow Up. Don’t worry, even if you uninstall Blow Up then the panel is left behind. After you install Blow Up, restart Photoshop and then look in the Window->Extensions menu to turn on the gallery wrapper panel.
You can get a cheap frame from an art supply store and staple the canvas yourself, but we found that it is hard to align the edges perfectly and avoid cracks in the ink. Notice the misaligned edge in our homemade fern example in this article. After trying multiple professional printing services, we found APC to be the best canvas printer. If you give them our discount code of ALIENSKIN0900 then you can get 10% off.
We have a support article on this topic, and the gallery wrapper panel also has built-in help.
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Hi Jeff! Thank you for the helpful tips here.
A little off topic, but since you mentioned you like APC above all the canvas wrap makers out there. Let me ask, what supplier in your search offered canvas with a course texture? Millers used to offer a course canvas (ink jet as well) about five years ago, but since replaced with the smooth tight woven canvas. I personally love the random bumps and heavy course texture and have had a helluva time finding anything close.
Thanks!
Jason
Hi Jason,
I agree with you. There are a lot of canvas wrap printers out there.
I recommend that you speak with someone at a local professional camera store. Look for a place that rents & sells pro photography gear and makes large prints in house. They probably still sell a lot of film too. The people that work there will have a good knowledge of where to find a specialty canvas like you described. They have a lot of interaction with photographers working in your area and have, most likely, heard something about it already.