iPhone Photos to Canvas Art – How to create art with your iPhone photos.
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011What you will need: Your iPhone, Photoshop or Photoshop Elements and Canvas Press
Difficulty: eh…a little Photoshop knowledge helps and a little math (nothing crazy)
iPhones and smartphones are fantastic. I mean you don’t have to worry about a thing when you leave the house as long as you have your iPhone (except maybe getting mauled by a lion…maybe that’s just me). But seriously, you have your phone, email, web, navigation and camera all in one amazing device. Let’s concentrate on that last mention…the camera. Gone are the days of going to the supermarket to buy one of those cardboard disposable cameras for your upcoming vacation. Now you have a pretty amazing tool that lets you take awesome photos no matter where you are (grocery store, amusement park, restaurant, bathroom…ok I hope you aren’t taking too many photos in the bathroom) you get the point.
The question then becomes, “I have 400 photos of my kids, family, friends…now what do I do?” You could hold onto them forever…trapped in your phone only to be seen when you endlessly scroll through your photo library as you try to find that one photo you took of Cher walking through the airport OR you could transform your phone photos into a very unique piece of collage wall art (minus that photo of Cher). Let’s go through the steps to making your summer vacation photos, birthday party photos, Christmas photos, or even the entire year’s photos into an awesome collage that can serve as art, a photo album, and family history all in one very cool canvas print.
1. The first step is to download all of your iPhone photos to your computer. Easy enough.
2. Sort through them putting them into separate folders by their orientation: horizontal and vertical.
3. Open Photoshop and create a new file sized to however big you want your photo canvas to be. We will use 36”x24” as an example. 180dpi is perfect, if it’s only 100 dpi we can work with that too.
Canvas Press iphone photos to canvas. Opening new file in Photoshop.
4. Now you will use your math skills. You will have to resize your photos to fit evenly into your final 36”x24” image. For my example I am going to resize all of my horizontal photos to 6”x4” at 180dpi(which will fit 6 photos across my final image). Perfect fit. Ok so what do I do about my Vertical photos? I am going to use my crop tool and crop them all to 4”x4” at 180dpi. Now I have consistent building blocks for my collage.
Canvas Press iphone photos to canvas cropping the vertical images to 4″x4″ for this project
5. Here is the fun part. Drag and drop your resized photos into your final 24×36 image and move them around to where you want them (ie chronologically, or whatever looks best…there is no wrong answer). I like to do mine straight across and kind of chronologically…especially for an entire year of photos. It helps me relive those memories even more. Here is what mine looks like so far…I love the patchwork look of this.
Canvas Press iphone photos to canvas step 5 in process
Fantastic, now you have an almost complete photo to canvas personal work of art from your otherwise unused iPhone photos. The last step to transform your photos on canvas is go to the Canvas Press website – www.canvaspress.com and upload your finished image. For this example you will probably choose either the solid border or mirror border option so you can make sure you see all of those beautiful photos you took with your iphone.
We at Canvas Press are always here to help if you have any questions about this or any other project you may have. Soon you will have your very own gallery wrapped canvas print hanging in your house. Take a look at this example. It is just a tiny bit bigger than 36×24 inches but how cool is that to have as a conversation starter in your house?
A year's worth of iPhone pics transferred to a canvas print with a float frame
image courtesy of house love
