Thursday Tip: Crop Ratios

Have you ever uploaded your photos to be printed, waited in anticipation to pick them up, and pulled them out to see how amazing they are only to find that part of the head/arm/leg/anything is cut off? How frustrating is that?!?

There were a few times this happened to me when I was printing baby pictures of my little {M}, and it made me so mad! I wanted good pictures of my baby to show off! I now understand that there is a ratio to a photo, and that when you upload an image that has been cropped to a certain size and you choose a size that is different than the original ratio, the printer will decide what should stay and what should go! A computer decide what part of the image is important to me ... no thanks!

The basic ratio is 2x3. Photos aren't usually printed at 2x3, but they are printed in 4x6 (a 2x3 ratio). Unfortunately, we often print them at a 5x7 or 8x10 or 11x14 size as well. When we print them in those sizes, we lose part of the image. Ever wondered how much? Check out the awesome images below from Pure Photoshop Actions that show exactly what happens.

 

Wow ... that is a lot that we lose anytime we make it a 8x10 or larger print (even the 5x7 is too much)! It is uncomfortable (for me, anyway) to look at the image with so much sky on one side and nothing on the other! When you upload this picture to be printed, you want to move the crop so that the people in the image are in the center instead of leaving it up to the computer to decide what you want in your picture. Once you find where it is for your printer, it is usually a very simple step to take before you submit that final order. Best of all, that simple step will make you be much happier with the results!

Same thing here! We lose anytime we make it a 8x10 or larger print! If you uploaded this image to be printed and didn't make any changes, you could easily lose the bottom of the picture and it would look like they weren't standing on anything! Once again, figure out how to change it with your printer, and adjust the crop lines so that you don't lose any part of the picture that you want when printing your images.

Because I don't want my clients to lose important aspects of their pictures, I always crop to a 2x3 ratio, and I generally leave a little more in the image than I do when I make a print of it. I do this because you lose parts of the image whenever you make an enlargement (as shown above) and it wouldn't be a great picture if the biggest you could get was a 4x6 without cutting off the head! I am always happy to crop to a different ratio when requested, but this is the size of every image on a client's disk.  That way, enlargements can be made and you can decide what you want in the picture! Don't forget, you are always welcome to buy professional prints, in which I will adjust the crop to make sure it looks perfect with nothing important missing from your priceless image!