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How to Set Up Canvas Gallery Wraps with Mirrored or Colored Borders for Print

How to Set Up Canvas Gallery Wraps with Mirrored or Colored Borders for Print

Do you have an image you’d like to have gallery stretched with custom colored borders or mirrored borders, but you are not quite sure how to size it for a gallery stretch? No problem! Follow the easy steps below and you’ll have that image hanging on your wall in no time.

In the example below we used the full version of Photoshop to accomplish this task; however, you can use any type of image editing software available to you.

The first thing you will need is to open your image and size it correctly. To get the gallery wrap to be as centered as possible on the front of the stretcher bars we suggest that you size your image to be exactly what you want to be seen on the face of the canvas. For canvas, we do not use fractional inches, but only full inches. In this example let’s say you want a 20”x16” finished size, so you need to size the image to be exactly 20"x16".

Image sizing Image sizing

Any excess in any direction at this point, you want to crop off. This needs to be exact otherwise the edge of the image or any mirror lines you create will not line up properly.

The image with the excess cropped offThe image with the excess cropped off

Once cropped, you will be left with what will be seen on the front of the canvas.

Now, onto to the borders! You need to add a 1 3/4" border all the way around the image, of either a colored border of your choice, or a mirrored edge of the image, depending on what you decide to do. You do this by extending the image (or canvas in Photoshop) out on all sides by 1 3/4". After you have added the border to the image you should be left with an image that measures 3 1/2" larger than the finished size, or the size you want to end up with.

Adding a borderAdding a border

In this example you wanted a 20" x 16" finished sized canvas. So, the image size with the added borders should now be exactly 23 1/2 x 19 1/2".

Image size with added bordersImage size with added borders

At this point you would add the color of your choice to the borders, or copy and mirror out the edge of the image to fill the 1 3/4” border on all sides.

Image with mirrored sidesImage with mirrored sides

A few things keep in mind with different colored borders or mirrored edges. When canvas is stretched either by hand or on a machine, try to be as exact as possible and get them as tight as possible, but canvas is somewhat stretchy by nature and the longer the canvas is the more it stretches. In other words it might not come out to be exactly on the mirror lines after it's stretched. If this is a concern, we suggest blending the mirror line of the image into the borders, if you have the skill for that, and this way it will make the edges less noticeable if the image is slightly off. If you are doing a colored border, choosing a color that is closer to the background edges of the image is helpful as well. Always remember to save the image as something else (ie: image_Gallerywrap.tif) when you are done so you always have your original, and that’s it! The image is now correctly sized and ready to upload to our website.

This pretty much wraps up the how to portion of the article. Hopefully it has given you a better idea of how to add custom borders to your images.

May 1, 2014
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