Can any image be made into a beautiful wall mural?

Certain wall mural companies will offer you a choice from a bank of pre-selected images and some will offer you a choice of thousands of images which originate from web-sites such as shutterstock.com and istock.com. Is there an advantage to be able to choose from thousands of images? What are the advantages/disadvantages between the 2 options? Obviously, the advantage to able to choose from thousands of images is having the variety in selection, style, theme and color. However, in order to select an image that will make a good wall mural, I will explain certain criteria that should be followed.

1-The most important: the quality of the image. Generally, it is possible to produce a good wall mural from a 20 mega-pixel image. In certain cases, such as images of forests, a good wall mural can be produced from a 10 megapixel image. It is important to remember that a JPEG image has been compressed to such a degree that there is less detail in both the image and the color. An Image in TIFF format will give you better results. Another fact to consider is that many wall mural companies artificially enhance the number of pixels in an image without improving the quality of the image. It is important to not only check the pixels, but also the megabytes. For example, a 25 megapixel image (5000×5000) should be around 25 megabytes. If the image is only 5 megabytes, the image has been artificially altered.

2-The Seams: The seams will be more visible if the background is a uniform color (a blue sky with no clouds). In images with texture, such as forests, the seams will be less visible.

3-Consider the scale: When viewing an image on your computer (example: an image of 15cm x10cm or 6’’ by 4’’ ), you must take into account that one centimeter on the image will be magnified 24 times on a 2.44m (8 ‘) wall. Therefore, if you have an image with a close-up of an animal`s head and the animal’s nose is 2 cm on the screen of your computer; it will have a dimension of 48cm on the wall.

There are other factors to consider (a very dark image will make the room seem smaller, some details in the original image such as rain/dew drops might appear as blobs once they are blown up into a wall mural size). The purpose of this article is not to produce a comprehensive list of things to consider when choosing an image but to demonstrate that it is not so easy to choose a good one for your wall mural. If you have any questions about an image or questions about this article, please contact us. 

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