Preparing work for print

• Upload the largest original you have — never a screenshot, re-save, or messaging-app copy (those strip resolution and metadata).
• Stay in RGB (sRGB is ideal). CMYK exports are rejected because they’d be colour-converted twice.
• Crop to a framed ratio — 1:1, 2:3, 3:4, or 4:5 — or use the built-in crop tool at upload.
• Photographing physical work? Even, indirect light and a square-on angle matter more than the camera.

Export at your canvas’s full resolution — don’t downsize for upload. PNG or maximum-quality JPEG both print cleanly; keep the file under 20 MB.

Digital files get the most out of Galerin’s print enhancement. Clean digital edges survive more upscaling than photographic grain, so a digital source qualifies for up to 3× enhancement at fulfilment (photos stop at 2×) — the same file unlocks meaningfully larger sizes. The tables below show exactly how many pixels each print size needs.

One caveat: the enhancement bonus is detected from your file’s metadata. Exports straight from Procreate, Photoshop, Affinity, Krita and the like are recognised automatically; a digital work that was screenshotted or passed through a chat app may not be.

A modern phone is a perfectly good capture device for paintings, drawings, and prints — if the light cooperates. When we detect a phone capture we automatically balance its lighting and colour at print time, but a good capture always beats a corrected one.

• Shoot in daylight near a window, or outside in open shade. Never use the flash — it hot-spots the centre and glares off any texture.
• Keep the light even across the whole piece. A gradient from one side to the other is the most common problem we correct.
• Hold the phone square-on to the artwork — parallel, centred — so the piece isn’t skewed. Prop the work upright rather than shooting down at an angle.
• Fill the frame with the work, tap to focus on it, and hold still (or brace against something). Check the corners are sharp before uploading.
• Turn off “scene enhancement” filters if your camera app has them — we want the artwork’s colour, not the phone’s opinion of it.

For flat work on paper up to tabloid size, a scanner beats a camera every time: perfectly even light, zero perspective distortion, exact colour. Scan at 300–600 DPI at the artwork’s physical size, in colour (even for black-ink work — it preserves the paper’s warmth), and export a PNG or high-quality JPEG. Turn descreening off for original art — it’s for printed halftones and softens real texture.

Galerin’s pipeline is sRGB in, colour-managed out: we hand the press a well-defined RGB file and it converts to the paper’s profile at print time. Files in Adobe RGB or Display P3 are converted faithfully, not stripped. The one thing we can’t accept is CMYK — it would be converted twice and shift badly.

If you want to preview how your colours will sit on the paper before anyone orders, download the press profile for our stock — Archival Matte Paper P9570 — and soft-proof against it: in Photoshop, View → Proof Setup → Custom and pick the profile; in Affinity Photo, add a Soft Proof adjustment. Matte paper has a gentler black and a narrower gamut than your screen, so deep shadows flatten slightly — brightening shadow detail a touch before upload is the classic compensation.

Download the paper ICC profile.icc · 4.8 MB

The profile is for previewing only — always upload your file in RGB. Don’t convert your working file into it.

Prints are offered per size based on your file’s resolution. At or above 250 DPI a size prints natively; below that, our fulfilment enhancement bridges the gap — further for born-digital files than for photographs and scans. The numbers are the pixels needed on the image’s long edge.