Printing Photos

[roundinthird]

Hello Everyone

I Have A Printing Problem I Can' T Resolve. I Crop My Photos To The Image I Want To Appear In The Print , However, The Image Never Fits Into The 4x6 Format. Some Of The Image Always Gets Cut Of. I Am Using An Hp Printer At Home. I Also Have This Problem If I Print The Photos At Places Like Costo Or Target.

Help

Tommy

[Canuck935]

Hi Tommy,

Printers always crop ever so slightly (by enlarging the photo a little) to ensure that the image will cover the entire piece of paper. The only way to avoid this when printing is to make the picture smaller than the size you want and then increase the canvas size to the size of the print so theres a border around your picture. That way any cropping that happens will take away some of the border instead of from the picture.

An easier way would be to leave just a tad of extra space when taking the picture. Then you won't have to worry about the slight crop removing anything critical from your composition.

Hope this helps.

[cr_mmurillo]

You may have to crop with 4x6 ratio. In photoshop CS, you can constrain the cropping tool to keep the ratio so it is for sure the correct print size. Make sure its unit of measurement is in inches not pixels. I hope this helps. I use to have this problem too.

[Canuck935]

You may have to crop with 4x6 ratio. In photoshop CS, you can constrain the cropping tool to keep the ratio so it is for sure the correct print size. Make sure its unit of measurement is in inches not pixels. I hope this helps. I use to have this problem too.

I think you're right. Reading the original post again, I don't know how I missed what he was saying. It must have been too early in the morning for me.

Another method he can use is adjusting the long side of his crop to fit in a given print size. For example, if I wanted to print a picture that is say 5 inches high and 10 inches long on a standard 8x10 I would again change the canvas size in a photo editing program to 8x10. That would make the entire picture fit on a single print, but with empty space around it. Otherwise most printers will do a default center crop of the image area.

This is also a big issue with camera's that have 4/3 sensors. The standard 4x6 print size will always crop a little of the top and bottom with the standard center crop. If the canvas size was tweaked to make it fit on a 4x6 without cropping the picture then there would be empty space on either side of the picture.

Hopefully some of that made sense...