Gift Guides
When a custom piece involves a photograph — a wedding photo frame, a portrait, a preserved memory with an image inset — the single biggest factor in how the finished piece looks is not our craft. It is the photo you send us. A brilliant frame around a blurry, over-compressed image will only make the blur more obvious. The good news is that a great reference photo does not require a professional camera or any technical knowledge. It requires a few simple habits, and knowing how to send the file so it arrives at full quality. This guide covers both.
The first and most important quality is focus. A sharp photo taken on a three-year-old phone will always beat a soft or shaky photo taken on the newest one. When you look at the image at full size, the eyes and faces should be crisp, not smeared. If you have to zoom in and the detail dissolves into mush, that softness gets printed exactly as-is.
A few things that quietly ruin sharpness:
Motion — someone moved, or the camera did. Common in candid celebration shots.
Digital zoom — pinching to zoom before taking the photo throws away detail. Move closer instead.
Screenshots — a screenshot of a photo, or a photo of a screen, loses a huge amount of quality.
The rule of thumb: if the photo already looks a little soft on your phone screen, it will look softer once it is printed and set behind resin. The piece can only be as good as the file.
Resolution is simply how many pixels make up the image — the more there are, the larger and sharper it can be printed. As a practical guide, aim for images that are 2000 pixels or more on the long edge. Most phone cameras from the last several years easily exceed this if you have not compressed the file. You do not need to check pixel counts manually; the bigger issue is usually how the file is sent, which is where most quality is lost.
Well-lit photos reproduce beautifully; dark or harshly-lit ones fight you the whole way. Soft, even light — a shaded outdoor spot, a bright room away from direct glare — flatters faces and preserves colour. Heavy shadows, orange indoor lighting and on-camera flash all reduce how good the final piece can look. If you have a choice between two photos, pick the better-lit one even if the pose is slightly less perfect.
Here is the one thing worth remembering above all else. When you send a photo through WhatsApp the normal way — as a photo — the app compresses it heavily to save data, throwing away much of the quality. The image looks fine on a small screen and then falls apart when printed larger.
To avoid this:
Send the photo as a document / file, not as a photo. On WhatsApp, use the attachment menu and choose "Document," then pick the image. This sends the original, uncompressed.
Or share the original from your gallery or a cloud link.
When you start a custom order with us, we will always tell you the best way to send images so nothing is lost.
This single step often makes a bigger difference than the camera the photo was taken on.
Technical quality matters, but so does the moment. When it is a keepsake, choose an image that:
Shows faces clearly and at a reasonable size within the frame (not tiny in a wide landscape).
Captures the feeling you want to remember, not just the sharpest random frame.
Has a little breathing room around the subjects, so the composition sits well inside the piece.
If you are torn between a technically perfect photo and a deeply meaningful one that is slightly softer, tell us — sometimes we can work with the meaningful one, and it is always better to have the conversation than to settle silently.
One promise worth making explicit: we review every reference photo before we begin, and if an image genuinely will not do your piece justice, we say so. It is far kinder to ask for a better photo up front than to deliver a finished keepsake that disappoints. If the best available photo is limited — an old print, the only surviving image of someone — we will still do everything possible and set honest expectations about the result. Preserving a memory is worth a careful, honest start, which is exactly how we treat every commission on our studio process.
Ready to turn a favourite photo into something lasting? Message us on WhatsApp and we will guide you on sending it at full quality.
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Every piece in the journal began as someone's idea. Tell us yours — colours, keepsakes, occasions — and we'll pour it to order.
24 March 2026 · 5 min read