Recommendation: The Canvas Factory

I recently had four large canvas prints done using The Canvas Factory via their online shop (here). The Canvas Factory promote themselves as being Australian based, which is one of the key reasons I chose to use them. I will confess that my first choice was to use Office Works as I have been happy with previous work done by them. But when I checked the Office Works site I found their pricing to be about double what I was expecting to pay. Hence, I went to what you might call my ‘fall back’ option of The Canvas Factory who were, at the time, offering a 50 percent discount on their already quite reasonable pricing.

I have done previous ‘tests’ with other canvas print businesses. You can review my posting “A brief comparison of four canvas printing services (Australia)” here. In that review I compare: My Picture; Office Works; Diamond Photo; and The Canvas Factory. I found that The Canvas Factory version of my test print had a noticeable green cast but even with that it came out second to Office Works.

A photograph of an arc-lantern advertising slide  produced on canvas.

With my recent four canvases that I sent off to The Canvas Factory—one of which was used as the icon picture for this post—I can report that there is no such green cast to be seen. The colours are bright and correct. They have either changed equipment, changed operator(s), or adjusted their pattern buffers (Star Trek reference) so as to cater for the green cast.

The four pictures I had done by The Canvas Factory, which are the first four pictures talked about in this post here, came back being almost exactly as I had set them up in Photoshop. The colours and exposure were so close to how I had adjusted them using my colour-correct DELL UltraShart monitor that it was almost impossible for me to pick any issues. And the wrapping was just as I had requested—to within millimetres.

With a background of about 54 years of photography where I have done black and white processing (developing and enlarging/printing), colour processing (developing and enlarging/printing), and more recently colour calibrating screens and printers, I am somewhat particular when it comes to the accuracy of computer-based printing of photographs.

Factoring all this in, based on this experience with The Canvas Factory (as things can, and do, change) I would award them with very close to five stars.

I feel I should just note that there are some special considerations that need to be taken into account when sending pictures off to be printed onto canvas in order to get a good result. Typically you can’t just send off any picture and expect a quality result if you have not done some basic post-processing to prepare the picture for printing to canvas. I have some posts in the past about preparing a picture for printing to canvas and you can search the Web for other ‘experts’ input on what you need to do. I am thinking that I might do an updated post on this topic in the near future.