Need Help with prints!!!

[Monica Fermin]

I have my first official family portrait shoot this weekend. I was referred to an online photo lab (Meridian Pro) on this forum to order the prints. I was just on there to check it out and wanted to order some prints of my own family portraits I shot a couple of weeks ago. I've just hit a wall When choosing different sizes for prints I just realized they don't fit!!! They are all being cropped in some form or other. The only print size that would be untouched is the 4x6. What do I do when the client requests a certain size? Do I have to shoot in a different way? Should I not frame my shots so tight? Or, am I doing something wrong when choosing my print size? :gah:

If anyone out there could help me out, I would greatly appreciate it!!

 

[Flash Harry]

I shoot to crop, always, like you said dont shoot too tight, most popular print sizes require cropping, do it in PS with dpi/ppi at 300 per inch then submit the files, you'll get back what you want. H

 

[Big Mike]

It always seems to come as a big surprise when people realize that the popular print sizes have a different aspect ratio.

Yes, you will most likely need to crop the image to fit...so it would be in your best interest if you left some space in the composition when shooting. With practice and experience, you can visualize the crop before you even take the shot.

Of course, you don't have to crop...you could print the shot with blank space to fill in the difference.
Or you could edit the shot to fit your required paper size. The newest version of Photoshop (CS4) has a cool new tool called 'Content Aware Scaling' which could help in some situations. Adobe demos Photoshop CS4's content-aware scaling