New Kids on the Shop!

We are always looking for new prints artists, so when we come across a gallery which catches our eye, with exciting and innovative art, then we sometimes grant a free print account, cool eh? The following deviants are just a few of the people who have been granted free prints accounts over the past few weeks, go check them out!

Quality Control Update

Over the course of the past weeks we have experienced an increase of print submissions with issues such as low quality images, insufficient bleed and images that were enlarged and stretched (read: disproportionally resized) to meet supported aspect ratios. So this month we would like to take the opportunity to point out these common mistakes in print source image production and how to easily prevent your prints from getting rejected due to such. Artists which are new to our Prints Program as well as long time Prints users can benefit from reading this.

Low Quality Images

Low quality images are images with sheer technical issues such as pixelation, high compression and artifacts which can result from artificially enlarging, disproportional resizing, using unsuitable re-sampling algorithms and having been saved, or re-saved several times (!!!) as lossy formats, with high compression. We see this happen with every art medium, be it digital photographs that were taken at low quality settings, or simply with a low quality camera, film photographs/negatives that were not scanned correctly and possibly edited as mentioned above, and traditional art for the same reasons, be it photographed or scanned.

The best way to produce high quality print images is to produce your artwork, start out using high quality settings according to our print source requirements right from the very start.

Digital Photography

For making prints of digital photographs, you will need to find the best balance between image quality and the sizes you wish to have available for the photos. Please note, bigger does not necessarily mean better quality in all cases. You will need to be knowledgeable regarding your cameras abilities and we suggest reading the information that came with your camera further to gather a better understanding of its technical information and abilities. Examples of this information would be pixel dimensions of different quality settings or if your camera uses compression. Knowing such things will allow you to understand better what your camera can produce. A good way to find out first hand the best settings for certain situations is to take many practice shots of the same subject using the different settings of your camera. This will allow you to compare the results directly.

Digital Art

If you want to make prints of your digital art, be it paintings are drawings etc. start out with a canvas that has the dimensions of your desired print size.

When using stock photographs and textures, your print size options are limited, depending on the size of the stock objects used. These can often drastically differ in size, in which cases we recommend you don't enlarge smaller elements to fit with the bigger elements, but rather reducing the size of the bigger elements to fit the smaller ones. As mentioned, this can limit your options of available print sizes, but will help ensure your final image is of acceptable quality for prints, given the stock material used is of acceptable quality in first place. Pure vector artists can consider themselves very lucky in terms of print size options, because due to the technical nature of their creations, there is theoretically no limit of size in which print images can be produced in. When producing vectors and saving your final creation in a digital image format, make sure it is the size suitable for your desired highest print size. If necessary, re-scale your vectors in your preferred vector program and save it again, but do NOT open the previously saved digital image in a digital image editor and resize and re-save it there, as this would greatly decrease the quality of your work. If you create tack sharp vector art, you want your prints to look just as sharp.

Traditional Art & Photography

When scanning your art to produce print files, be it your traditional drawings and paintings, as well as photographs and negatives thereof, you should set your scanner to scan your artwork at the desired print size, preferably even a tad bigger, if you're not scanning a definite selection, so there is enough safe space for editing.

For example, if your sheet is 9x12" and would like to make prints at the same size, we recommend scanning at 150 DPI for good quality prints, at 300 DPI for excellent quality prints. When using the latter 300 DPI setting in this case, you'll be able to make 18x24" prints at 150 DPI. Say you want a 30x40" print at 150 DPI, you scan your 9x12" sheet at 500 DPI. Why? 30x40 is 9x12 times 3.33^, so your scan DPI setting has to be a multiple of the desired 150 DPI by the same factor; 150x3.33^=500 DPI.

Please read the following Prints FAQs:

What are the requirements for a print to be approved?
What are the minimum image sizes for each product?
What is aspect ratio?
Do I have to submit an image at a ratio that exactly matches a print size currently offered by Prints?
What does resolution mean?
Is any image with any resolution or aspect ratio printable?
What is DPI?
My piece is not the resolution or DPI you recommend. Can I still sell it?
Why can I not resize the image to the correct DPI?
I'm not sure if my image quality is OK. How can I tell?
What if I add space to make it the right size?
Where can I find templates to help me size my images correctly for prints?

The Bleed Edge

If your print source image has text (such as copyrights, signatures, titles, etc.) or any other important parts of the image/artwork are too close to the print edge, there will be the risk that these parts be cropped off after the printing process, partially or fully. To prevent this from happening to your prints and products, please read faq298.

For the best experience regarding the subject of bleed, we strongly encourage the use of our print image templates, available as PSD and JPG format, which can be found at faq576. These templates contain preset guides that indicate our recommended bleed edge settings, which guarantee that no cropping of any important elements will occur. To ensure this, do not place any text or any other important parts of your artwork (body parts such as head, feet and hands, for example) beyond the guides, whereas, depending on the nature of your artwork, elements like the background of your image can exceed the bleed edge, if you desire your image not to have a border in form of negative space.

After adjusting the layout of your print image, the template layer MUST be removed before saving the final image, which means the red bleed edge indicators MUST NOT be shown in the final print image that is intended to be uploaded.

Canvas Wrapping

In addition to our Prints and Products source image templates, we now also have templates for Canvas Prints available for download in FAQ #576. To clarify the difference between our regular prints and canvas prints in this regard is that canvas prints are mounted on a wooden frame and about 1.5 inches of your image are wrapped around the mount. Due to this it often can happen that important elements of your artwork simply get wrapped around partially or fully, which can turn out to look very undesirable. For this we have made PSD and JPEG format source image templates which indicate the outer 1.5 inches all around the image which could happen to be wrapped around the mount. Mind that you can supply a full bleed image very well, but you have to be aware that anything exceed into the wrapping area will more or less be wrapped around. As canvas prints are getting mounted manually, wrapping may or may not vary by several millimeters.

Print Templates

When using our print file templates, please do not stretch your original artwork's image to fill your chosen template's canvas. First off, you should use a template that comes nearest to the dimensions of your artwork, to ensure your print image would not have an excessive amount of blank space, unless desired. If you want your image to have as less blank space around your artwork as possible, you can proportionally reduce (>keeping the original aspect ratio) the size of the templates canvas (NOT image), given that no important elements exceed the bleed edge indicators, as described in the 'Bleed Edge' section above. If your artwork does not fully match the aspect ratio of the desired print size (and template thereof), you can either utilize the blank space as a simple or artistic border to match your artwork as you desire. Alternatively, you can crop your artwork a little, but only if no important artistic elements of your artwork will be lost due to that.

Customer Service Update

Help us to help you

If you should ever need to contact the Prints Customer Service Department to obtain assistance with your order or with print account, please bear in mind the following key points, which will ensure that your inquiry is dealt with as efficiently as possible.

When sending in a ticket regarding a problem with a print, please make sure to include the title of the print so we may know which image is having the problem. We're good, but we aren't mind readers

When sending in a ticket regarding any kind of technical error, please include as much information and details as you can. If possible, please have a screenshot availabe for further reference. Please note that we cannot receive attachments via the customer service email system, so you will have to upload your screenshot to a suitable image hosting facility, or to your deviantART scraps, and provide us with a link.

Please do not reply to existing problems by filling out a whole new ticket just to send in a reply. You may reply to customer service emails with your information. If the issue is new then please fill out a new ticket. This allows us to keep an organized record of communication and will ultimately result in your inquiry being resolved in a timely manner.

If you have not received a reply from us regarding your ticket within 24 working hours (Monday to Friday) please check your email spam folders. Customers may find that their email account spam settings may be filtering deviantART emails into junk folders. This is especially true of hotmail accounts, so please make sure your email settings are allowing deviantART emails to be delivered correctly.

Frames and Glossy Prints

In order to provide you with goods of the finest quality, we are no longer providing frames for sale along with glossy prints. At times the gloss can stick to the glass and we've taken on board feedback from our customers to remedy this situation.

A reminder

Please remember that any inquiries regarding deviantART membership, subscriptions, deviantWEAR, and the general overall working of the main site, need to be sent to the Community +helpdesk. You may contact the help desk via help.deviantart.com (On the 'General Inquiries' tab) or email payment support at payment-support@deviantart.com and our community support staff will assist you as quickly as possible.