Does a canvas wrap cut off the edges of your photograph?

No. On canvas the image is mirrored around the edges rather than cropped into, so nothing near the border of your photograph is lost to the wrap.

What the wrap normally costs you

A stretched canvas is wrapped over a wooden frame, and that frame has depth. The sides have to be covered with something, and there are three usual answers.

Most printers pick the first: pull the image itself around the edge. It looks clean from the front and it eats an inch or so of the picture on every side. On a landscape with room to spare, nobody notices. On a photograph where somebody's shoulder is close to the frame, it takes the shoulder.

The second answer is a flat band of colour on the sides. Nothing is lost, and the object reads as a print stuck to a box.

What happens instead

The third answer is to mirror the edge pixels — reflect the outer band of the image outward, so the sides are made from a flipped copy of the border rather than from the picture proper.

Seen from the front, the full photograph is there, uncropped, out to its own edge. Seen from an angle, the sides carry a continuation that matches in colour and tone without being part of the composition.

This is the default because of what we cannot know. A photograph arrives without telling us how close the subject sits to its border, and a crop that is harmless on one picture removes a face on another. Mirroring is the option that is never destructive, so it does not depend on guessing right.

Where it shows and where it does not

Mirroring is close to invisible on the edges most photographs have — sky, wall, grass, tablecloth, the out-of-focus part of a room.

It is more noticeable when a strong straight line runs off the edge of the frame: a door frame, a horizon very near the border, the corner of a building. The reflection makes a soft V where the line meets its own copy. Most people do not look for it, and if it bothers you the fix is a different substrate rather than a different wrap.

You can see this before committing to anything — nothing prints without a preview first, and the wrap is part of what the preview shows.

Whether canvas is the right choice at all

The wrap is one question. Whether canvas suits the photograph is a larger one, and the answer depends more on the source than on the frame: canvas has a visible weave, which flatters some images and fights with fine detail in others.

Substrate changes what suits works through that properly. The short version is that canvas tends to be the right call for photographs with texture and forgiving detail, and paper or aluminium for the ones where sharpness is the point.

Canvas is offered on Signature at 16x20.