Canva Image Quality: Will Your Card Print Sharp?

What stays sharp, and what can go soft

Text, shapes and lines that you make in Canva stay sharp at any size. They’re drawn from outlines, not pixels, so printing them bigger loses nothing.

Photos and uploaded logos are different. A photo, or a logo saved as a PNG or JPG, is a grid of tiny coloured squares called pixels. Print it bigger than its pixels allow and the edges go soft or the squares start to show. Our guide to raster v vector images explains the difference.

300 dpi or 600 dpi?

dpi means dots per inch: how many of a picture’s pixels land on each inch of the card. The more there are, the finer the detail.

• Canva’s PDF Print saves at 300 dpi. PDF Standard is lower, at 96 dpi, which is one reason to always choose PDF Print (Canva’s download file types).
• Canva recommends 300 dpi as the minimum for print, and suggests zooming to 200% to check a design (Canva’s help on blurry prints).
• Our artwork setup guide asks for 600 dpi for photos at the size they’re printed.

So a Canva PDF can’t reach 600 dpi, however good your photo. What you control is the picture you upload. If it has fewer pixels than 300 dpi needs, it prints softer still. If it has plenty, Canva’s download has the most detail to work with. Our free check looks at the resolution of every file and tells you if a picture will print soft.

How many pixels does your picture need?

It depends on how much of the card the picture fills. Divide the width in millimetres by 25.4 to get inches, then multiply by the dpi, and do the same for the height. Or find the size in the table.

A picture that runs to the edges includes the 3mm bleed on every side, so it fills 92 x 60mm, not the card’s 86 x 54mm. Canva’s bleed is a fraction wider, 92.35 x 60.35mm, which adds only a few pixels.

To see a picture’s size in pixels on a Mac, select the file and choose Get Info: it’s under More Info. On Windows, right-click the file and choose Properties, then Details. Canva takes JPEG, PNG, HEIC and WebP pictures up to 50MB each, so a big original won’t be too large to upload (Canva’s upload formats).

Where blurry pictures come from

Most soft pictures on a printed card started as a copy made for a screen. These are the ones we see most often:

Stretching is the easiest one to miss, because the picture looks fine on screen. Here’s the same photo, 600 x 400 pixels, at two sizes on a card:

A made-up card and photo, drawn to show the idea. Pixels are drawn larger than life so you can see them.

Logos: use the best version you have

Soft edges show most on a logo, because logos are crisp shapes and lettering. In order of preference:

1. An SVG file. Canva accepts SVG uploads under 3MB, and an SVG stays sharp at any size (Canva’s upload formats).
2. An Adobe Illustrator file, if it was saved as PDF compatible. Canva takes those up to 300MB.
3. The largest PNG or JPG you have. Check its pixels against the table above, for the size it fills on the card.

• Ask for the original. Whoever designed your logo should have an SVG, or the file it was made in.
• A white box round the logo? Use a PNG or SVG with a transparent background. Canva’s Background Remover can take the box away, but it’s on Canva’s paid plans (Canva).
• Only a small or blurry copy? Our design service can redraw it for £29 +vat. That’s design work, so it isn’t part of the £10 fix.

Check your PDF before you send it

1. Download PDF Print, with crop marks and bleed. Our Canva guide shows the settings. If your plan offers Compress PDF, leave it off: Canva says compressing can lower image quality (Canva’s download file types).
2. Open the PDF on a computer if you can, where the screen is big enough to see detail.
3. Zoom to 200%. Canva’s own help suggests 200% for checking a design for print (Canva).
4. Look at every photo and every logo edge. If they look fuzzy or blocky at 200%, they’ll look soft on the card. Text should look crisp.
5. Replace anything soft with a bigger original in Canva, and download again.

Canva also offers Flatten PDF, under Advanced settings in PDF Print. Canva says it merges your design’s layers into one so every element prints, and suggests a flattened PDF Print for print shops. It also makes the file bigger and stops it being edited (Canva’s help on flattened PDFs). It doesn’t add detail to a photo. You don’t need to tick it for us: leave the setting as it is, and our free check tells you if anything in the file needs changing.

What we can do

• A free check on every file. We look at the resolution, bleed, colour mode and set-up, and tell you what we find before anything is printed. See our artwork checking service.
• Fix it yourself, free. Replace a soft picture in Canva and send the file again. We check the new one free too.
• £10 +vat for a technical fix to a finished file: sizing, bleed, alignment and colour settings. It can’t add detail that a photo doesn’t have.
• £29 +vat for design work, such as redrawing a logo from a small, blurry or photographed copy. Our design service has no limit on reasonable amends.

Our check is technical. Checking the wording, spelling and numbers on your free email proof is down to you, so read it carefully before you approve it.