Digital printing company CanvasPop is at it again. The Web-based print shop has been printing Instagram snapshots for mobile photographers since November. Now, Facebook photos can be printed on canvas.

Since inception, the company has wanted to dive head-first into the world’s largest archive of pictures on Earth. Perfecting the process to turn typically low-resolution Facebook pictures into smooth, large-format prints took more than two years, co-founder of CanvasPop Adrian Salamunovic told Mashable.

“We want to tap into that market,” he says. “This is where people keep images that are more important to them personally.”

When the company started printing digital pictures, customers would come in with low-resolution Facebook pictures they wanted to print after being turned away from other companies. CanvasPop welcomed them with open arms. The company claims to be the first to print enlarged Facebook photos of any size on canvas.

“We took that on as a challenge to develop something that will work with these images, all these images that our competitors can’t,” he says. “We will be able to take up all the business that our competitors can’t — that is really the root of this idea.”

How it works

When a small, low-resolution picture is enlarged, its pixels, or the little squares making up the picture, get distorted. CanvasPop created PicturePerfect technology, which is a process called “micro-vectorization.” The technology turns pixels into little lines that can be enlarged to any size without loosing smoothness of the image. This is only a small part of the secret sauce, Salamunovic says.