MyCanvas rocks!

by Karen

I can't say enough good things about MyCanvas. They have a ton of beautiful embellishments, frames and backgrounds. You can place text and photos anywhere on the page...even overlap photos/text. You can add any color border in any width, you can crop the photos any way you like, you can make them bigger or smaller by dragging the corners, you can rotate them and even reverse them. You can layer them, duplicate them, make them black and white or sepia, add a drop shadow for a more 3D effect, and you can make them as transparent as you want (very cool feature that I love). You can copy and paste photos and/or text from one page and paste them onto another. You can use any of your own photos as a background. You can make unique backgrounds by using one of theirs and then layering one of your own photo backgrounds on the top or bottom half of the page and putting a ribbon on the seam. Beautiful!

One of my favorite features of MyCanvas is that you can upload png photos (I couldn't do this with Shutterfly since they don't accept png files). This opens all kinds of doors for creativity and gives a totally professional look to the book. For those who use photo editing software like Photoshop, you can remove the background of a photo and just keep the person (or object)...then when you save the photo as a png file, the background is transparent and you can place the person (or object) onto another background in your MyCanvas book (so if you want to make it look like you're standing on the Vegas Strip, you can). You can also make your own embellishments doing this. The possibilities are endless, especially if you have a photo editing software like Photoshop.

The color and image quality of the pictures in the printed MyCanvas books are awesome. I was disappointed with Shutterfly's oversaturation of some old black and white photos I used...they had a touch of sepia in them from aging which I liked - looked great when I printed them on my own printer, and they looked great on my computer screen. But when I received the book from Shutterfly and saw how oversaturated the brown tones were in some of the photos, I was very unhappy. So I made another book using the same photos but this time using MyCanvas - they came out perfect. Stunning color tones that looked exactly the same as what I have on my computer and the image quality is amazing - sharp! My sister has made many photo books with Shutterfly and has been happy with them, but after seeing the MyCanvas book I made and knowing there is so much more freedom of creativity with MyCanvas, she will be using MyCanvas as well.

If you have photos already uploaded to SmugMug or Picasa, it only takes a few seconds to add them to MyCanvas...which is great if you have a lot of photos because it saves time. Or you can upload to MyCanvas directly from your computer but it will take longer. Either way, there is no compression or image loss...the pictures retain their full resolution.

You can't make a custom cover with MyCanvas if you go over a certain amount of pages - I think it's over 80. My books have more pages than that, so I use the bonded leather cover with the engraved titles - looks very nice and comes in black or burgandy. I ordered three copies of the same book which has 150 pages, and only one of them had a very minor binding flaw with just the first page...not as clean and streamlined at the edge where it's bound. But it's barely noticeable (I'm just extremely picky),and the rest of the pages are fine. The other two copies turned out perfect, and I'm so thrilled with the image quality of the photos and the unique look of every page. The pages themselves have a good feel and are of good quality, although slightly less heavy than Shutterfly's.

I LOVE MyCanvas and can't imagine going back to other photo book sites that don't offer all the embellishments, etc., have so many restrictions and turn out with less than perfect color and image quality. MyCanvas really does allow freedom of expression, and why have limits if you don't have to? I'm attaching a picture I took of a page from my MyCanvas book to show how I used a photo as a background and then layered a png photo with a transparent background on top of it. The image is sharper in the actual book...taking a photo of it doesn't turn out as well.