Need Help Sizing Photos

qswombat

I'm feeling dumb. I've used Photoshop for many years, just tweaking things one photo at a time until they work, as a hobbyist. I'm not a pro or designer. I'm working on setting up a site on Smugmug for selling historical photos from where I work. The photos are actually scanned reproductions of photographic collages hanging in my building and the collages were put together by students with scisors and glue, so the scanned individual photos are all odd, nonstandard sizes.

Here's my problem. I don't know enough to consistently size my images so that my customers don't see "photo must be cropped at checkout" for every image. I've experimented quite a bit and spent a good bit of time searching and reading the help, but I must be missing something. If a Photoshop document size is within the margins of an 8x10 (or 5x7 or whatever), why am I still seeing heads and captions (the captions are at the bottom of each image) cut off when I go to check out? There's got to be a piece of math or some Photshop option that I'm not understanding.

Help? Advice?

Many thanks in advance.

http://www.utrecrecsportsmedia.com

PBolchover

The trick is to get the aspect ratio (long side divided by short side) of your images to be equal to the aspect ratio of the prints on offer. If the aspect ratio is different, then part of your image will have to be cropped, before it can be printed.


There are two ways in which you can help this:
* Only offer prints of a single aspect ratio. (E.g. don't offer both 6x4 (AR=1.5) and 10x8 (AR=1.25) )
* Set up a proof delay. When the client orders a print, you can check the aspect ratio of the print, and re-upload a version of the image that you have cropped yourself. (This will allow you to set up different crops, depending on which print sizes have been ordered.)