Wall groupings can be as profitable as large prints

As families begin to downsize into smaller homes or apartments, you may hear a new objection when selling large canvas wraps: “I love that image, but I don’t have anywhere to hang it.” Fortunately, with a little advanced planning you can offer your customers a modern alternative that looks great in any size room, and that you can retail for almost the same amount as one large print.

The trick is to visualize an image as a banner. Banners are the horizontal advertising images at the top of many web sites. To make them, web designers slice a 7:1 horizontal strip out of a larger 4:5 or 5:7 ratio image (see red box in the example). You can use this same idea to easily create a series of 3 or more images from a single one.

In this example, I started with a 4×5 ratio landscape image in ROES, selected an 8×10” portrait canvas wrap from the Gallery Wraps Prints catalog, dropped in the image, and zoomed in until their was enough image remaining on both sides to fill a left and right 8×10” print.

After ordering the center image, I selected the 8×10” canvas wrap again, dropped in the same image, and repeated the process for the left and right side prints. By playing with the zoom, I made sure that the “wrap” on the center image did not include the boat on the left. The canvas wrap crop lines in ROES made it easy, and the entire process took me less than 5 minutes.

Here’s a tip: if you are setting up a shot with a great background, use a tripod, have the subjects step out of the frame and shoot the background again, or you can slightly rotate your camera and shoot to the left and right. Then you have even more room to adjust the images. Just keep the zoom level the same in ROES so that the prints match.

Obviously, not all images can be used this way. For example, you should never cut the subject or a group of people in half using this technique. In addition, you need enough pixels in the original image to let you zoom while maintaining image quality.

However, offering an alternative to a large canvas wrap print can be the perfect solution to the objection, “I don’t have anywhere to hang it.” With a wall grouping, now they will.