Custom Photo Mats

If you’re among the 67.4% of Americans that call themselves homeowners, you likely are constantly looking for new ways to customize your space and make it your own. A custom photo mat with a photo of something that matters to you is a unique way to express yourself and be more comfortable at home.

Here, we’re going to talk about how you can choose a photo for a custom-printed photo mat and format it so that it can be printed on one seamlessly. Read on to take the first steps toward developing a mat that’s perfect for you!

Come Up With a Rug Idea

The first step to coming up with a custom rug design is to decide on a concept for it. One of the most common ideas is to create a rug featuring your pet or a picture of you with your furry friend. This is a classic for a good reason- nothing spells ‘home’ quite like your beloved dog or cat.

If you don’t have a pet, you can use a family photo from a favorite time in your life. Want to remember that trip to Niagra Falls every time you come into your house? Interested in seeing a photo of yourself with your kids in London when you come back from work?

These are all options for photos that you can have printed on rugs. If the idea of having your face on the floor is weird to you, that’s fine! You can take a photo you took of a treasured location that you’ve visited and want to remember and smile back on each day.  Or these Photo rugs are great on walls.

You can also have car photo rugs made featuring vintage cars, collectible cars for garages, and car shows. If you’re enthusiastic about automobiles, this is an awesome choice.

No matter what you’re excited about, you can put that on a rug. Really, from your imagination to our creation!  We can put any good-quality image on a custom image rug.

Choose Your Favorite Image

Once you decide on a theme for your custom image rug, it’s time to choose the perfect photo to put on it. If you choose to go with a rug of your dog, sort through all of the pictures of him that you have on your phone or your computer. Remember to choose a portrait photo if you want a vertically-aligned rug and a landscape one if you want it to lay horizontally.

If you have a few different pictures that you like, go with your gut. Choose the one that looks best to you!

However, you also will want to consider the surroundings of the picture. If your room has a primarily warm color scheme and incorporates a lot of red, for example, a photo of your pup rolling around in the grass may not be the best choice. Instead, you may want to select one of him sitting in front of your fireplace or sleeping on a yellow couch.

If your custom photo print rug clashes with the rest of the room, it may be more of an eyesore than a delight. Make sure that you thoroughly think through your color and design scheme before deciding on a picture.

Make Sure It’s High Quality

After selecting a picture, you need to make sure that it is a high-quality image. Every photo is made of millions of tiny pixels placed next to each other in different colors to form an overall image. The more pixels you have, the higher quality (or ‘resolution’) the picture will be.

If you use a camera that doesn’t provide you with the necessary quality, it won’t be possible to blow it up large enough to print on a rug. If it were to be blown up anyway, it would be highly pixelated and look nothing like the original image.

Most digital cameras and cell phones set to a high image setting produce an image more than adequate for any sized item. You can easily set the image resolution on your iPhone or your Android’s camera settings to ensure that you’re getting a picture of sufficiently high quality. All you need to do is go to ‘control,’ → ‘more options,’ → ‘picture size,’ and then choose an available resolution.

Sizing and Formatting

Suppose that you already have an amazing picture of your dog and want that to go on your rug, but it is low resolution. It would help if you had it to be at least 300 dots per inch (DPI,) but let’s say that it’s only at 100 DPI. What can you do?

It actually isn’t tough to change the sizing of a photograph. Online photo editors like PicMonkey will let you resize your photo by entering the desired dimensions or scaling it by percentage. Once that’s done, all you need to do is click ‘apply,’ and your photo should be upgraded to a workable resolution.

You also may want to reformat your photo before printing it onto a custom rug. This means increasing the contrast or adding filters to bring out the hues you most want to showcase. You can also change the photo from portrait to landscape or vice versa, but make sure that the image isn’t distorted in the process.

Order a Custom Photo Mat Today

Once you have an image that can be uploaded to and printed on a custom image rug, it’s time to begin the process of creating your mat with Rug Rats.

Contact us with more questions on the process and show us the photo you want to be printed on a rug and delivered to your doorstep. Our experts will help you to make sure that your image is formatted perfectly and that it’s ready to go to print. We look forward to hearing from you soon!