As Instagram grew, so have the printing services in its periphery, allowing you to get your digitally-filtered images slapped on everything from pillows to tiles to coasters. Photocarver does those services one better by not just printing your photos — they carve them into slabs of wood, instead.
Yep, your digital photos turned into wood relief, the same kind of woodcarving they used to do in the days before photographs came into the world. And the service isn’t limited to Instagram snaps, either. Instead, you can send in any digital image and have it carved into a wooden frame.
Instead of traditional relief carving with chisels and hammers and all that, Photocarver uses milling machines to drill lines or punch dots into the wood. The carved areas combine to create the likeness of the digital image, giving you one of the most novel ways to display photographs up on your wall. From afar, the reliefs look like standard black and white pictures, with the milled lines and dots revealing themselves only once you come close.
To order, simply upload a photo on the website and use the web app to get a virtual likeness of how it will look like once finished. From there, you can decide whether you want to commission a relief of the image, pay the fee and wait for it to be shipped.
Hands down, Photocarver offers one of the most unique ways to “print” your favorite pictures. At prices starting close to $200, though, it ain’t cheap, either, so maybe save it for a special picture rather than a snap of last week’s gourmet dinner that got 100 likes on Instagram.