Can You Control the Quality of Your POD Products?

When you want to sell your art as framed art or printed on products, it seems like it’s as simple as picking a supplier to link to Etsy or a Shopify account.

But if you want your customers to get good quality products, it seems to be a gamble. When you set out to choose a POD, you can spend all day reading about how each POD is great and how they all suck.

Even if you order products from each provider to test them out, every POD has tons of comments about their inconsistent quality. I ordered a cool poster from Art.com a while back, and it looks out of focus. Who fulfilled that order? Does the artist know how bad it looks? Did they do a test order and it looked fine for them?

One Redditor tried Prodigi, Printify, Printful, Gelato, and Gooten. Of all of them, Gelato had the worst quality with distorted colors and blotching. Another person said their best-quality prints have all come from Gelato.

It was a big wake up call for me when I took for granted that just meeting the printing requirements for Redbubble was enough. I foolishly ordered over $200 worth of posters of my own images, expecting to proudly display them in my home, just to have my excitement drain out of me when they arrived. They all look severely out of focus.

Not one to give up so soon, I set out to find a way to enlarge my images without losing quality, because just meeting the printing requirements wasn't enough. My first large print, I met their basic requirements and the image was fuzzy and unenjoyable. There was no way I’d make that available for purchase. When I discovered bigjpg.com, it was a game changer. I ordered a similar print after running it through bigjpg, and the resolution was top-notch.

The difference? POD providers give you sizes and DPI minimums, but you can’t just resize an image with Photoshop and expect it to come out well when printed. Bigjpg can resize it and maintain the resolution and clarity. I don’t fully understand how they do it, but here’s their description: “Using the latest Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, bigjpg intelligently reduces noise and serration in images. This allows the images to be enlarged without losing quality.”

There are tons of people trying to sell their AI-generated art without trying to improve it before uploading, and I’m willing to bet their customers are pissed when their canvas arrives. Between not bothering to fix obvious AI errors like extra fingers, objects that make no sense, or blurred-out backgrounds they all seem to have, and not enlarging properly, the images look bad. If they are run through an AI enlarger, a lot of the time the quality still stinks. Bigjpg is the only one that improves the images as it enlarges them.

Once I experienced the difference between enlarging my images and having Bigjpg do it, I had to wonder: is it the POD provider or the quality of the image sent to them?

I feel like I should be earning a commission from them with the praises I’m singing, but I’m not. I’m just pointing out there’s a lot of digital art out there that’s expected to be a great product but looks grainy and like the artist didn’t bother to make it good. How many of them are complaining about their POD of choice instead of improving the original image?

I’m about to try out Gelato and Printify, so I guess I’ll find out if the issue is inconsistencies with the PODs or just my fault.

*Originally published on Medium*