CanvasPop Prints Giant Canvases Of Your Instagram Photos [Review]

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CanvasPop turns your iPhone photos into works of art.
CanvasPop turns your iPhone photos into works of art.

When the folks at CanvasPop emailed to tell me they wanted to print one of my Instagram photos onto a canvas and mail it to me, I felt a little like I was being stalked. They’d even picked out the photo ahead of time – one I took while I was testing out the excellent TIFF-shooting 645 Pro app.

Still, I wasn’t so creeped out that I wouldn’t send my address, so a week or so later a huge package arrived with the picture inside. And it’s pretty neat.

The Good

It’s my photo, blown up huge on a canvas. What’s not to like? The color fidelity is hard to gauge as, well, it’s an Instagram photo with a bunch of weird effects applied, but it certainly looks good. The image has been enlarged without any blurriness or pixelation creeping in, which — as a former designer — I know is a tricky thing to pull off.

The CanvasPop canvases come in various sizes and thicknesses, and this is one of the thicker ones. I’d recommend the deeper frames as they feel a lot more like a cool object than thinner ones, which are more like plain pictures.

The Bad

Thanks to the need to print a photo onto its surface, the canvas has a thick layer over it, so you don’t really see the canvas texture very well. This could be good or bad depending on your preferences, I guess, but I prefer something a little more raw. And while the canvas is very competently stretched onto the frame (and comes complete with a signed sticker telling you who made it), mine wasn’t as tight or neat as I’d like it.

Then again, I used to stretch my own canvases, and I was very particular about getting them super tight and with perfectly folded corners, so perhaps I’m just being fussy here.

The Verdict

If you want a cool, personalized gift for somebody, then you should totally take a look at CanvasPop. You can use any picture you like, not just those from Instagram, and you can pick from a whole lot of shapes, sizes and styles. They’re not cheap, but then it’s unlikely you’ll be buying many of them anyway. And if you are a terrible photographer but are giving a canvas as a gift to a good photographer, you can even just send them a gift card.

[xrr rating=90%]

Source: CanvasPop

Thanks: Adrian!

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