How To Turn Your Digital Photos Into Frameable Art

The best part of having all your photos and negatives digitized is the ability to tinker around with them using one of the many photo editing apps out there. Adding filters to digital images to transform or enhance them is both fun and addictive and it explains the runaway success of Instagram. Filters are so popular that untouched photos are more the exception than the norm on social media these days.

For people who have Instagram filter fatigue, there are a number of other apps that allow us to create artistic versions of our photos. Prisma leads the pack here with a set of filters inspired by real artists and their work.

It’s fun playing around with its growing library of effects. You can feed a family portrait into the app and see it emerge as a Norman Rockwell painting. Or make a picture of flowers look like something Monet would have painted in a creative spurt. Even daily life can take on a glamorous quality with a filter. Just try applying one to a shot of a messy room and watch it transform into a Matisse arrangement. Arty photo apps such as Prisma add hue, dimension and other elements to photos, making their subjects seem more intriguing and exotic.

And some results are likely to be so good that you may want them to get them printed rather than let them languish in digital oblivion. But, as with anything that involves printing, image resolution may be a roadblock here.

Even if you start out with a hi-res image, you may not end up with one. The latest generation of iPhone cameras enable you to make large prints of close to 10 x 14 inches and these can be further scaled if you are willing to compromise a bit on quality. If you are working with print photos that need to be digitized, you can get them scanned at a resolution that supports printing and enlargements – either with a high-end scanner or through a quality photo scanning service. But once you run these images through a photo filter on Prisma or a similar app, the end result is a much lower res image that may look great on a device but is less than spectacular when printed out.

But there is still hope for those of us who would like to create Prisma galleries in our homes. In its latest release, Prisma has doubled the resolution of filtered images making them good enough to print, up to a certain size. You can do this at home the low-cost way, or send it to a company like Shutterfly for professional grade printing and framing. Another option is Canvaspop, a business that specializes in making canvas prints of people’s Prisma art, Instagram photos and more.

A selection of artistic photos can dress up your walls and make you smile, apart from serving as a great conversation piece. You can also swap them out every now and then for a new grouping. If that seems like too much work, consider different themes for different walls: portraits on one, travel shots on a second, everyday life on a third. Nothing personalizes a space better than photos. And with the right filters, your handpicked photos become something more. They become eye-catching art.

 

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