Use the enlarge tool when the art is a photo or a painted image with soft detail, and redraw it as vector when the art is flat colour with clean edges, such as a logo, lettering or a simple illustration. Either way, judge the result the way it will print: at full print size, zoomed in on the parts that matter, not on a phone screen.
This is for sellers whose art arrives too small: a buyer's photo for a custom order, an old sketch scanned at low resolution, a logo a small business sent as a tiny image, or early designs you made for screens. Both tools live in the Alomations Design Editor, which opens on paid plans, and both aim at the same target, a file that holds up at 12 inches and 300 DPI. Only enlarge or redraw art you have the right to use.
Why small images fail at print size
A print file is measured in pixels and the print is measured in inches. Printify recommends 300 DPI for JPEG and PNG files, and Printful's guidance is 150 to 300 DPI, depending on the product. Alomations works to 12 inches at 300 DPI, which means 3,600 pixels on the long side.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. A photo 1,200 pixels wide, stretched across 12 inches, has 100 pixels for every inch, a third of what a 300 DPI file needs. Changing the DPI number in the file's settings does not help, because it adds no pixels. Printful's own advice is to make sure the file is sized "to match the actual print dimensions" so the DPI is calculated correctly. If DPI is new to you, our explainer on what DPI means for print files starts from the basics.
Two tools for two kinds of art
The Design Editor gives you two ways to close that gap, and they suit different art. Choose by what the artwork is made of, not by how small it is.
| Question | Enlarge a photo | Redraw as vector |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Photos, painted art, textures, soft shading | Logos, lettering, line art, flat illustrations |
| What you get | A larger image with more pixels | Shapes that scale to any size |
| Watch for | Faces, hands and small text that come out changed | Lost gradients, merged colours, simplified curves |
| Avoid it for | Flat art you could redraw cleanly | Photos and painterly art |
| Check by | Viewing at full print size, zoomed in | Zooming far into edges, corners and small letters |
When to enlarge a photo
Enlarging is for art whose detail is soft and continuous: a buyer's photo of their dog, a watercolour, a textured painting. The tool builds a bigger version of an image that is short of pixels. Any enlarger has to estimate detail the original never captured, so treat the result as a careful guess: edges and textures usually come out cleaner, while the smallest details are where it can drift.
Order the steps so the enlarging works on what will actually print:
Crop the image layer to the part you will print.
Remove the background in one click if the design needs a transparent edge, then tidy stray pixels with the eraser.
Enlarge the result.
Check it at print size, as described below, before you place lettering or other layers on top.
The editor keeps an undo history and design versions, so you can compare the enlarged image with the original and step back if something changed that should not have. For the general technique outside our editor, see how to upscale a low-resolution image for print.
When to redraw flat art as vector
Vector art is made of shapes rather than pixels, so it has no resolution to run out of. Redrawing as vector suits flat colour with clear edges: a logo, a badge, line art, a text-based design, a simple illustration. It is the better choice whenever the original is blurry but the design itself is simple, because a clean redraw beats an enlarged blur. Our guide to vector or raster for POD designs covers the trade-off in depth.
Help the redraw by simplifying first. Recolour the palette down to the colours the design really uses, so near-identical shades do not turn into separate shapes. Afterwards, check thin lines and the small closed shapes inside letters such as "a", "e" and "o", which are the first details to fill in or break. If the lettering comes out lumpy, it is usually cleaner to delete it and set the words again with a font, including fonts you upload yourself, than to repair traced letters by hand.
Redrawing a photo as vector rarely works, because it turns into flat patches of colour. That can be a deliberate poster look, but if you want the photo to stay a photo, enlarge it instead.
How to check the result at print size
Neither tool is finished until you have looked at the output the way a printer will. A mockup will not tell you: Etsy recommends listing photos of at least 2000 pixels in width and height, and at that size a soft print file can still look crisp on a shirt. Work through this instead:
View at full size. Zoom to 100% and scroll across the whole design, not only the centre.
Inspect the risky parts. Faces, eyes, hands, text, thin lines and any edge that meets transparency.
Compare with the original. Look for anything that changed meaning: a different expression, a letter that turned into another letter, a detail that was not there before.
Check both garment colours. Look at the light and the dark version, because halos and leftover background pixels show up on dark fabric.
Print a section on paper. A part of the design printed at actual size on a home printer is a cheap way to see what 12 inches really looks like.
For a custom order built from a buyer's photo, send the buyer a preview through Etsy messages before production, so any surprise happens before the print and not after it.
What the print-ready file looks like
Once the art passes your checks, Alomations prepares the print file for you. Every design comes back print-ready at 12 inches and 300 DPI, 3,600 pixels on the long side, as a transparent PNG with an SVG alongside. You also get light and dark versions from the one design, and tone rules per garment colour decide which version each shirt colour gets, automatically, with an override when you disagree. A light variant turns lettering white even where it touches the drawing, and a dark variant keeps painted art and line drawings readable. Our page on print-ready files explains each part of that output.
Buyer photos follow the same path. A design can hold a slot for the buyer's photo, and when the order arrives the photo is cropped around faces and detail and can be redrawn in a chosen look before the print file is prepared. The Design Editor tour shows where the enlarge and vector tools sit among the other image tools, and the features page lists the rest of the editor.
Frequently asked questions
Can I just set the DPI to 300 in my image settings?
No. The DPI number only describes how densely the existing pixels are spread. A 1,200-pixel image is still 1,200 pixels, and across 12 inches it prints at 100 pixels per inch whatever the setting says.
Will an enlarged photo look as sharp as a high-resolution original?
Not always. Enlarging handles soft, continuous detail well, but it estimates what was never captured, so check faces and text closely. When a sharper original exists, use it.
Can I redraw a photo as vector?
You can, but the photo turns into flat areas of colour. Use it only when you want that graphic, poster-like look.
Is the Design Editor on the Free plan?
No, the Design Editor opens on paid plans. The Free plan covers listing runs with print-ready files, real orders and up to 4 AI images a month, and you can compare plans on the pricing page.
You can start on the Alomations free plan to see runs and print-ready files in action, then move to a paid plan when you need the Design Editor.
