Nowadays, personalizing home decor is extremely popular. People want their homes to be unique and display things they find special. One of the best ways to make a home unique is to have personal photos displayed on decor such as blankets in a living room or bedroom. For example, young couples that love their dog will display a photo of Scruffy playing in the yard on a bedside rug. Or, grandparents will have a photo of all the grand kids at Christmas on a throw pillow on the bed.
But for some people, decorating with personal photos can be difficult and they usually encounter two difficult questions: 1) How do I know my photo will look good on home decor? and 2) How can I customize my product to make my photo look even better? We’ve helped thousands of people decorate their home with these personal mementos and we’re happy to answer these questions, so read on!
Will my photo work on home decor?
Naturally, each customer’s project will be unique and so will their photos. One person will want their picture on small items like a 20″ x 20″ throw pillow, while someone else will want them on a 50″ x 60″ photo blanket to hang on a wall. There’s quite a difference in size there, so the same picture will not necessarily look good on both items. There are three main things to consider when choosing a photo for a photo product, and in 90% of cases the following guidelines will help ensure your picture will look good on a custom home decor product.
Size of the photo
Size of the photo is a key factor in determining if it will look great on a custom home decor item. First, we recommend photos of 1 megabyte (MB) or greater in size. This is the quickest and most basic step in determining if your picture will work on a home decor product. Usually if it is this size it will be a good choice.
Keep in mind that there will be rare cases where this guideline does not apply. For example, a photo with a lot of people and background objects may be greater than 1 MB, but if the faces are already blurry, enlarging the picture on a home decor item will only make the blurriness more apparent. We want your photo product to look great just as much as you, so choose images that are clear and sharp in addition to the 1 MB size requirement.
Quality of the photo
At VisionBedding, we see images on home decor all day every day. We know that the top factor in determining if your photo will look good when displayed on an item like a custom photo blanket is the quality of the picture. When we talk quality, we mean the pixels per inch, also known as dots per inch (dpi). We recommend photos with 100 dpi or greater.
Not an expert photographer with a fancy camera? No problem. These days, a lot of smartphones are already set from the factory to take photos of this high quality. On most devices you can check your photo quality by looking at the details of your photo on your camera, phone or tablet.
The other plus with all the technology out there is that you can download simple photo editing apps to improve clarity, resolution and color for free. Be careful though, action shots can be great as gifts, but smartphone cameras are best used for still shots of faces. If you do happen to be a good photographer, action shots of athletes or pets really make great presents on photo products.
Type of Image vs Size of Product
Usually people want to display their closest relatives, babies, or friends on a photo product- which are great ideas. But you must remember when choosing pictures that the type of image does matter and will depend on the chosen size of the product.
In the example at the beginning of the article, there’s quite a difference in size between the throw pillow and the blanket. Because of this difference in decor item size, the same photo will not necessarily look good at full scale on both items. The image may be increased in size possibly 20 times greater than the original photo, depending on the product you choose. So if your photo is a close-up of your children’s faces, and you choose a large throw blanket for the couch, your children’s faces could be so large you cannot recognize them on the blanket.
But, worry not. In this case, we recommend using some of the techniques listed below that we’ve acquired over the years to create fabulous photo products.
How Can I Make My Photo Product Look Even Better?
Many people are not artists or designers, and they do not know how to make something awesome out of their photos. Actually, many people don’t realize they can do whatever they want with the photos! No idea where to start and need some inspiration? Here are a few things we recommend trying out on a photo product.
Techniques to a cool design
We offer custom photo products for almost all of our home decor items, but a photo blanket is one of the most popular so we’ll use that as an example. Think of the photo blanket as a blank white canvas. What kind of setting do you want your photo to take place in? Is your blanket a gift to your parents to remember that beach vacation you took this summer? On your blank canvas you can first choose an image of a tropical beach sunset as a backdrop. Or, knowing they’ll display this blanket in the living room which has a red and black theme, you could keep it more simple and choose a red color for the backdrop to match the room.
Now, what about how you want your parents to feel each time they look at the blanket? You could make them laugh with text of an inside joke from the trip. Or you could simply write “Florida Family Vacation 2017″ in cursive font at the bottom. Your text can go anywhere on the blanket and in any font and color. Choose something that is really meaningful to capture their emotion each time they use the blanket.
But what about making each photo stand out from the backdrop? You can put a simple black bold border around each photo. Or what about a border that looks like a Polaroid picture? This idea is one of our favorites as it really adds the feeling that these pictures were from special memories.
To jump to another level of creativity you could get a design of multiple sandcastles on the beach and put each image inside the sandcastle! How great is that? The sky really is the limit with these custom photo products.
As you are learning, you can choose a single photo or multiple photos for these products. You can adjust the size and shape of each picture to fit exactly how you’d like. You can scale pictures of faces to closer to the original image size like 8″ x 10”, but you can scale up photos of landscapes to much larger. However, keeping all these tips in mind, a professionally taken family photo with extremely high quality can be scaled to almost any product size.
Additional Tips for Great Photo Products
- Choose a specific memory and add details with custom text that includes the year and type of event, or something even more specific like a joke that you don’t want to forget.
- Choose colors you know will work with the room in the home. If you choose a hot pink background color for a present for your grandparents, it may get hidden in a closet because it doesn’t match the beige living room.
- If you are using a still image, make sure everyone has a great smile. Remember, you can edit the image with an editing tool like Photoshop or Adobe to adjust color, red-eye or brightness before creating a product.
- Action shots of athletes or adventures can make great photo products! Just make sure the image is clear and has the correct quality and size requirements of 100 dpi or greater and 1 MB or greater.
- Some popular photo products besides blankets that you may not have considered are window curtains, rugs and bedding. But don’t be afraid to venture out into some of our other products like throw pillows or photo shower curtains.
Remember, if you have any questions just ask us! We’re here to help and we love creating unique photo home decor items for you.