Is your photo good enough?

If you are uncertain about your digital photo, file or artwork, you upload it to us for checking without any additional costs. We will be looking at the resolution, colour, shape and use of the image. We will reply to you by email with our comments.

To start with, you should be optimistic about your photograph - we use a variety of techniques to get the most from your images, and even a poor image can look amazing when given the Contrado treatment.

Not only do we have a vast experience of manipulating images digitally, but for most of our products we print to fabric, which is a very forgiving medium. We also use continuous tone printing, which really helps to smooth a lot of undesirable noise or pixellation.

Every image is individually artworked - we do not automate. This enables us to have maximum flexibility with your images, and we can bring to bear our full attention to detail and imaging experience with every image. We understand that this is not just any old photo you have chosen, and we do our utmost to get the most of it.

Bear in mind the product that you would like your image applied to - a small pouch purse will needs only a small file, whereas a large canvas (and yes - we do some really large ones!) will need a correspondingly bigger file.

We are happy to discuss any requirements or reservations you may have about your image. For any questions, please use our Image Check form, and will be happy to look it over and give you some expert advice.

Before you contact us, though, have a look at the information below, it may help! And don't forget, because our production process is fully human moderated, we will endeavor to contact you if we think there are serious problems with your image.

Digital photos

There are two common issues with digital photography: pixellation and compression. Digital pictures are made up of many coloured squares, called pixels, and pixellation is when a photo is not of high enough resolution causing those squares to be visible, which can look unpleasant. If you are worried about your picture, simply open it up in an image editing program (EG Paint), and zoom in a bit. If it is starting to look blocky then it may be of too low resolution.
Please note though, you can get away with a lot more with sunsets, landscapes and such because they are more about shape and colour than details.

^ Original	^ Pixellated	^ Over compressed jpg

The second common issue with digital photographs is when they are over-compressed. The JPG file format (which is most likely the format you are using), offers really impressive file compression. This means that a lot of digital information can be packed into a small file - but at a price. The price is a loss in quality: ordinarily this is unnoticeable but sometimes, particularly if a file has been saved for the web, it can look unpleasant, giving a slight rainbow halo around objects, see pic. It is very difficult to remove this, but using a combination of digital filters can lessen it so it is acceptable.

Prints
Analog prints are not constrained by issues of resolution or compression. They do though have problems of their own!
Dust and Scratches - we remove these as best we can as part of the artworking process, but we may need to charge more if extensive renovation is required.
Blurring - there really isn't a great deal we can do with this. It is almost impossible to "unblur" a photo, although limited results can be had with some digital filters after we have scanned your image. Generally speaking though, if your photo is blurred as you see it now, that is how it will come out.
Colours faded or too red - We get a lot of old photographs, and one of the commonest problems with them is that the blue pigment tends to degrade faster than the red or magenta, leaving the colours unnatural looking. We can get amazing results by readjusting the colours - even a badly washed out pic can be brought back to life digitally. And, at the end of the day, you could always make it black and white.

Scanning
When scanning, choose to scan only the image area you need - the rest is bloat and will result in an image many times larger than you actually need.
With regards to resolution, it very much depends on the size of the photo and the product your would like us to make from it. We find if you scan a normal size print in at 600dpi there is more than enough resolution there for us to use for almost our entire product range.

Red eye, date stamp, finger in front of camera etc
Unless it is an extreme case, we can retouch your image to remove the offending marks free of charge. Please point this out to us though when you make your order.

Gift vouchers
you can buy any of our products as a gift voucher
>> gift vouchers