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3. CafePress Mousepad

I ordered a mousepad from CafePress and had one of my E. leukon photos placed on it. The mousepad's quality is real nice but I was disappointed the photo didn't cover the entire mousepad. The idea is great for real trout/bug nut, I just wish for $10 + $5 shipping the entire pad was covered.

You have to be careful when you get photos developed that you crop them to the exact size that they will be printed - otherwise, the company printing it has to make its own judgment on the best course (either leave blank space or risk cropping out something the customer wants included). You should have gotten the exact dimensions of the pad ahead of time and cropped your photo to those proportions. A tough lesson to learn, but the pad still looks great - definitely real enough looking to scare the crap out of bug-squeamish people when they reach for your mouse. Nice photo, John.

-Shawn

I'm sure you can make it print the entire mousepad. You just have to be careful with the "bleed" sizes on the pictures so you send one large enough that they can print a little off the edges before they cut it. I have to do that with lots of the products in my CafePress store and they come out just fine.

Yeah, Jason's right. When I said "crop them to the exact size that they will be printed," that's not really what I meant. I meant the PROPORTIONS in your photo have to be exactly the proportions of the print you want. You should probably not resize the image to the size you want or you'll lose resolution when it's printed (or does CafePress make you resize them, Jason?). And, as Jason said, you always lose a little on the edges when prints are made, but this should be a negligible amount in most cases - the biggest problems would occur if your photo had a thin border around it. Even the best printers and print-cutters need a little leeway to account for tiny shifts in the substrate they're printing on or cutting.

Sorry if my original comments were confusing.

-Shawn