Helpful Info

Prep your work by saving a high quality, low compression JPEG for uploading. TIFF format may also be uploaded, but the file size will be larger with little quality difference. Tag all files with a color profile, ideally AdobeRGB, although sRGB colorspace will work. We do not support embedding any other colorspace like CMYK. We print at 300 ppi resolution, so we recommend uploading the highest quality file you have. We don’t recommend artificially enlarging, or scaling up your file, as this will add pixels not in the original. Our site limits upload files to 25 mb size. The digital format that an image is stored in is very critical to quality. There are dozens of digital image formats, but the three most common are JPEG a lossy format, TIF, a lossless format and RAW an in-camera lossless format. Lossy means that image data is lost when the image is compressed while a lossless format retains all the original data, even when compressed. Your original digital photos, wether from your camera or from a scanner are your ‘negatives’ and should never be touched. Always work on copies of your originals. I shoot in RAW, save and work on my files in TIFF, and upload files for printing in low compression JPEG. In photo editing computer programs JPEG compression is usually expressed as a percentage where 100% is no compression and 0% is maximum compression. Usually visible distortion starts to appear at 50%. Adobe Photoshop uses a sliding scale from 0 to 12. Once compressed in JPEG format an image cannot be uncompressed, so you cannot regain the original quality.