Turning a photo into something a print shop or a cutting service can use comes down to two things a screen preview hides from you: alpha where the background used to be, and enough pixels to survive the printed size. This page covers both, and states plainly where a PNG cut-out stops being the whole job.
Two things, and only two: the area outside the subject must be genuinely transparent, and the image must carry enough pixels for the size it will be printed at. Everything else on this page is detail that supports those two.
A transparent PNG stores a per-pixel alpha channel, so the file itself declares "nothing goes here". The printer doesn't have to guess, and whatever is underneath — coloured vinyl, a kraft backing, a pattern — shows through exactly where you expect.
A subject sitting on a white background looks identical on screen and behaves completely differently downstream. White is ink, or the absence of it, and a shop has to knock it out by selecting the white — which eats highlights on the subject itself, and leaves a visible white plate if the removal is imperfect.
Resolution only means anything once you know how big the thing will be. On Pro, Cutano exports at your photo's original resolution up to 8192px; the free tier exports at a reduced resolution. PNG and JPG are yours to choose on every tier, layered PSD on Pro.
This is where a lot of sticker guides get vague, so here it is stated directly. A PNG cut-out is a rectangle of coloured pixels plus an alpha channel. An SVG is a set of shapes described mathematically. They are different kinds of object, and a blade-plotter reads the second one.
| Property | Transparent PNG cut-out | Vector shape (SVG) |
|---|---|---|
| What it is made of | Pixels with an alpha channel | Mathematical paths and curves |
| Prints at full quality | Yes, up to its own pixel size | Needs rasterising before printing |
| Scales up with no loss | No — fixed resolution | Yes — resolution independent |
| Tells a cutter where to slice | No — it carries no cutting path | Yes — this is its whole purpose |
| Produced by Cutano | PNG, JPG and layered PSD (Pro) | Not produced, not exported |
Put simply: Cutano does not export SVG, DXF or any cut-file format, and it has no integration with a cutting machine or a print portal. It gives you the image half of a sticker job done properly, and the shape half is yours to make in a tool built for it.
DPI is not a property stored inside a file like a name is. It is a relationship: how many of your pixels should be squeezed into one inch of paper. The formula is just pixels = inches × DPI, and you can invert it whenever you already have the pixels.
A 3-inch sticker at 300 DPI needs 3 × 300 = 900 pixels on that side. A phone photo is many times that, so a typical die-cut sticker has more than enough to spare.
At 300 DPI, 8192 ÷ 300 ≈ 27 inches, or about 69 cm on the long side — the Pro original-resolution ceiling. That is well past sticker scale, covering a large print sheet with headroom still left over.
Many files carry a DPI value that is only a printed-size suggestion in metadata. It changes no pixels. What decides sharpness is total pixels divided by the size you actually asked for.
| Printed edge length at 300 DPI | Pixels required | From an 8192px export (Pro) |
|---|---|---|
| 2 in / 5 cm | 600 px | Plenty of headroom |
| 3 in / 7.5 cm | 900 px | Plenty of headroom |
| 6 in / 15 cm | 1,800 px | Comfortable |
| 12 in / 30 cm | 3,600 px | Comfortable |
| 27 in / 69 cm | 8,100 px | About the limit |
The warning that goes with this: upscaling a small file does not create detail that was never captured. Interpolation smears and softens; it cannot invent an edge. That is exactly why exporting at original resolution matters for print rather than screen — a print file can always be scaled down cleanly, but it cannot be scaled up into sharpness. Export the biggest clean version you have and let the print engine shrink it.
On screen, a thin ring of leftover background is invisible against a dark interface. Once printed and cut, that same ring becomes a coloured outline tracing your subject — the single most common reason a homemade sticker looks homemade. The fix is knowing which control solves which symptom.
| What you see | Why it happens | What to use |
|---|---|---|
| Coloured halo following the outline | Background pixels left inside the mask | Edge contraction — eat it inward |
| Soft grey rim after print and cut | Feathering pushed too far; semi-transparent pixels print as a wash | Less feathering, then re-check at print size |
| Stair-stepped or jagged curve | Low resolution, or a hard mask on a diagonal edge | Slight feather only; export at full resolution (Pro) |
| A piece of the subject missing | Segmentation dropped it | Restore brush, non-destructive with undo |
| Something extra still attached | Segmentation kept it | Erase brush, then contract by a hair |
The rule of thumb worth repeating: contraction fixes the halo, feathering only smooths it, and heavy feathering is the thing that turns into a grey rim under ink. Contract first, feather lightly, and always judge the result at the size it will print — not at the size it sits in a preview. Refinement happens with the erase and restore brushes, which are non-destructive, so a wrong call is one undo away rather than a restart.
Sticker work has a convention that catches people out on their first sheet: a thin opaque border around the shape, slightly wider than the cut line, so the blade can wander a fraction without exposing a sliver of backing where colour should be.
If a shop asks you for a bleed or a border specification, that's a conversation about their press and their die, not about your cut-out. Send the transparent PNG they asked for, ask what border they apply, and let them handle it — most sticker printers would rather add their own border than inherit yours.
AI contact shadow, shadow blur and a gradient-faded floor reflection are the features that make a product composite look grounded and lit on screen. On a sticker they are pure liability: the shadow is semi-transparent grey pixels, and semi-transparent grey pixels print as a haze your shop cannot easily remove.
Same photo, two different exports: one is a cut file, one is a presentation. The features are worth switching off and on rather than picking a side permanently.
Sticker sheets are rarely a single subject. A shop wants a set, and doing twenty photos one at a time is where the job stops being fun and starts being work.
Batch processing runs the whole set at once with tiered scheduling, so a mixed folder of shots is handled in a queue instead of twenty manual taps.
Per-item retry means one awkward photo doesn't restart the run. Fix the stragglers individually and leave the good results alone.
Crop with guides, or one-tap smart crop to auto-fit the transparent subject, then set the canvas to a custom size or a preset ratio so the sheet is laid out for the format you're printing.
Free on the App Store. Contraction and feathering, brushes with undo, batch, and transparent PNG / JPG export — with layered PSD and original resolution up to 8192px on Pro — all on your device.
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