Custom Photo Shirts

Send us a picture, get back a shirt. Wedding photographs, baby pictures, a scanned snapshot from 1974, a friend's worst possible expression — custom photo shirts printed to order from whatever you upload.

Three Ways to Print a Photo

• Single-photo portrait — one image, centered and large. The straightforward version, and the right one for a memorial, a wedding or a baby shirt.
• Bootleg rap tee layout — the vintage tour-merch format: a big front graphic with the photo, and a tracklist-style back panel. Hugely popular for birthdays, bachelor and bachelorette parties and retirement gifts, because it turns a person into a fake album.
• Name and photo together — a picture with a name set in clean type beneath it, which reads better from a distance than a photograph alone.

What Makes a Photo Print Well

Printing is less forgiving than a phone screen, and almost every disappointing photo shirt comes down to the same handful of causes. Read this before you upload and you will get a better shirt.

• Send the original file. This matters more than anything else. A photo downloaded from social media or screenshotted from a message has been compressed two or three times and most of its detail is gone for good. Email the file straight from the camera roll.
• Resolution beats everything. A modern phone photo is plenty. A thumbnail saved from a website is not, and enlarging it does not add back what was discarded.
• Even light wins. Daylight from a window gives you detail in faces, hair and dark clothing. Direct flash flattens everything and blows out skin.
• Crop tight before you send. The face should fill the frame. A person standing at the far end of a room becomes a few dozen pixels once it is cropped to a print.
• Old prints scan better than you think. A photograph from the 1970s usually holds more detail than a modern screenshot. Scan it rather than photographing it if you can.

Every Image Is Checked by a Person

This is the part that matters and the part most print-on-demand shops skip. Every file you send is opened, cleaned up and color-corrected by hand before it goes anywhere near a shirt. If an image will not print well, you get an email saying so — before you are charged, not after a disappointing parcel arrives. Nothing is printed until you have seen a mock-up of the finished shirt and said yes.

What People Put On Them

Memorials, by a wide margin — a parent, a grandparent, a friend, with the years underneath. Then wedding and anniversary photographs; new-baby announcements; birthday shirts built around an unflattering photograph of the birthday person; bachelor and bachelorette parties; retirement gifts that collect thirty years of office photographs into one collage; and pets, which are common enough to have their own collection.

Faces, and How Big to Print Them

A face is the hardest thing to print well and the thing most people want. Scale decides it. Printed large across the chest, a face reads from across a room but every flaw in the original file is magnified with it — soft focus, compression artifacts, harsh flash. Printed small on the left chest, the same photograph looks sharper than it deserves to, because the detail is compressed into less space. If your file is less than perfect, going smaller is almost always the better trade.

Multiple faces work differently again. Two or three people in one photograph is straightforward. A dozen faces in a collage needs each one cropped tight and arranged in a grid, rather than one group photograph enlarged — at shirt scale, a group shot turns everybody into an indistinct blur. Tell us if a collage is what you want and we will lay it out that way.

Permission, Briefly

We print what you send, so the one thing we ask is that it is yours to send. Your own photographs, family pictures and pictures taken of you are all fine. Professional wedding and school photographs are usually owned by the photographer, so a quick message to them saves trouble. We cannot print copyrighted characters, band and team logos, or a celebrity's likeness onto merchandise, and we will tell you rather than quietly printing it anyway.

Choosing a Shirt Color for a Photograph

The background of your photo decides this more than your color preference does. A photograph with a bright or white background sits naturally on Ivory, White or Bay. A dark or moody image — a night shot, a dark-clothed subject, a black-and-white portrait — belongs on Black, Midnight, Graphite or Espresso, where the edges of the print blend into the fabric instead of sitting on an obvious rectangle. Mid-tones like Navy, Denim, Granite and Sage are the safe middle ground when the photo has a bit of both. Fifteen colors in total, and the proof shows you the real combination before you commit.

Sizes, Price and Delivery

Soft ring-spun cotton, classic unisex fit, sizes S through 4XL. Pricing is one rate for S through XL with a small step up for 2XL and above. Flat $4.75 shipping per order, free over $50 and 6 to 11 business days after you approve your proof. No minimum, so a single memorial shirt is as normal an order as thirty for a party, and 15 or more takes 25% off. Everything is printed in the USA.