Please help me with resizing!

Heart_Photography · Dec 8, 2009

Hello everyone,

I have been struggling with this one! I don't know what i am doing wrong can someone please help me out?!
When I try and re-size in photoshop adobe 7 I have used the crop and portioned it to the size I need. That never works right for me! Then i have went into image re-size and did it there. Well, when i go to upload to my printing co. i can't get it to fit the whole pic in the crop. It will cut the end off or something out of the pic. Is this something I am doing? Or the printing co.? I use Mpix. Any suggestions? I really need help on this one!!

Enough Already · Dec 8, 2009

Firstly, what are the dimensions of the final photograph?? There are a few issues. The main one is that there are printing standards. 6x4, 5x7, 8x10 etc. Once you go outside these, you going to have problems. If your crop window is not one of these (or the matching ratio 3:2, 4:3 etc) what will happen is the printing sofware will likely print to fill the frame along the width. So if you final photograph is going to be square, using 6x4 as an example, it will make the image fit along the 6in side chopping 1 inch off the top and one off the bottom or 2 inches from top or bottom (not sure exactly which). I suggest you print to match your frame height, then with a guillotine, trim the photo. Just be mindful about the final product if you are going to do some cropping in photoshop and how it will effect the final image. Never reduce your image pixel wise. Leave it as big as you can. As soon as you resize, parts of the image are thrown away which will effect the quality of the print. Hope this helps, hope I understood your issue.

KmH · Dec 9, 2009

Heart_Photography said:
Hello everyone,

I have been struggling with this one! I don't know what i am doing wrong can someone please help me out?!
When I try and re-size in photoshop adobe 7 I have used the crop and portioned it to the size I need. That never works right for me! Then i have went into image re-size and did it there. Well, when i go to upload to my printing co. i can't get it to fit the whole pic in the crop. It will cut the end off or something out of the pic. Is this something I am doing? Or the printing co.? I use Mpix. Any suggestions? I really need help on this one!!

What you need to do is crop, not resize.

Enough Already alluded to what you're butting your head up against.

It's called the Aspect Ratio. Most digital SLR cameras make images in a 3:2 aspect ratio (most point & shoots are 4:3). The 3:2 aspect ratio is print sizes of 4x6, 6x9, 8x12, etc. In other words the long side of the image is 1.5 times longer than the short side.

8x10 is a 5:4 aspect ratio, the long side is only 1.25 times longer than the short side.

An image made in a 3:2 aspect ratio will have to be cropped to be printed as a 5:4 aspect ratio.

So say you have an 8x12 image (3:2) and want an 8x10 (5:4) from it you have to do one of 3 things:

Crop 2 inches off the top
Crop 2 inches off the bottom
Crop 1 inch each off the top and bottom.

Here is an example I have made. The whole thing is an 8x12 (3:2), including the gray stripes top and bottom. the white outlines an 8x10 (5:4) and the black is a 5x7 (7:5) and it all works the same if it's in the landscape orientation instead of the portrait orientation I've shown here:

In the examples below, with 1 inch crop lines shown, you can see cropping might cut off parts you want. You need to have the finished image sizes in mind when you take the picture so you're sure to leave cropping room.