Preparing your artwork for a 300 dpi playmat print
A print is unforgiving in a way a screen is not. A screen is backlit and small; fabric is neither. These are the things worth checking before you send a file.
Pixel dimensions
At 300 dpi, a 60 × 35 cm mat needs roughly 7 090 × 4 135 pixels. That is the target. The arithmetic, if you want to run it for another size: centimetres ÷ 2.54 × 300.
Under about half that — say 3 500 px on the long edge — you are printing at around 150 dpi, and it shows on fine linework and small text rather than on large shapes. A soft painterly image at 150 dpi looks fine. A crisp illustration with thin outlines does not.
Do not upscale to hit the number. Enlarging a small file adds pixels, not detail, and most upscalers leave a faint plastic smoothness that is more obvious on fabric than on screen.
Aspect ratio and margins
60 × 35 cm is a 12:7 ratio — wider than most images you will have to hand. Anything squarer gets cropped top and bottom, so decide which part of the image survives before you upload rather than after.
Keep anything that must not be cut — a signature, a logo, a face near the edge — at least 1 cm inside the border. Printing and cutting have a small tolerance, and the stitched edge takes a couple of millimetres more.
Colour
Two things surprise people. Screens emit light and fabric reflects it, so prints read darker and slightly less saturated than the preview — most noticeably in deep blues and purples. And neon, which on a screen is a bright pixel, has no equivalent in dye: electric greens and hot pinks come back as their strongest printable version, which is vivid but calmer than the screen.
Practical response: if an image is already dark, lift the shadows slightly before uploading. Detail that sits in near-black on screen will be solid black on fabric.
Send sRGB. Converting to CMYK yourself usually costs you saturation for no gain — the conversion is done at print time against the actual ink and fabric.
Files
PNG or high-quality JPEG both print well. Avoid a JPEG that has been re-saved repeatedly; compression artefacts around hard edges enlarge with the image. If you have a layered original, flatten a copy rather than exporting from a thumbnail.
Then check it big
View the file at 100 %, not fitted to the window, and scroll around. Everything soft, banded or noisy that you find at 100 % will be on the mat. This is also what the preview in the Studio is for: you place the image in the real 60 × 35 cm frame and see what lands inside the print area before anything is committed.
One thing to keep in mind: personalised mats are printed individually from the file you approve, so that approval is the last moment the artwork can change. If you would rather start from something already built and colour-checked, the Riftbound collection has 51 designs at the same specification.