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Customer Cropping?

flyingpylonflyingpylon Registered Users Posts: 260 Major grins
edited April 29, 2005 in SmugMug Support
I take photos primarily for web display (for a yet-to-be-launched site), but at some point I'd like to start offering prints. The issue I face is that I crop my web images at a 3:2 ratio, partly because that's what my DSLR produces and partly just because I prefer it.

Because of the way I'm using my Smugmug account, I will need to upload separate versions of images for web display and printing. But of course, we all know (don't we?) that there is no "magic" crop ratio that will allow perfect printing for all traditional print sizes.

So my question is this:

For printing, would it be unreasonable to simply upload the full image with no cropping at all, and say "Here you go Mr./Mrs. Customer, crop it any way you want!"

Also, am I right in thinking that the crop tool doesn't allow the customer to crop away so many pixels that the print will not be of reasonable quality?

I should mention that I do not earn my living from photography, and my photos are not of such importance that I cannot live with a few people getting poorly self-cropped prints. I simply want to offer reasonably-priced prints as a convenience to people that happen to like a particular image on my web site. I really can't, and don't want to, spend a lot of time creating print-ready versions of the images beyond some very quick and basic color, shadow/highlight, and sharpening corrections.

So would this be a good idea, or am I setting myself (and Smugmug customer service) up for disaster?

Thanks for any advice.

Paul
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