Cropping images

Wood

I’m very new at this and I just put my first set of photos up for sale. However I noticed when I go to order some of the photos, it will request that you need to crop them. And that’s ok, however when it requires you to crop them you can’t get the full photo in the crop. I’m not sure what I need to do so the image is all there. This may be basic stuff but I need to know what to do or where I can read on this to see what not to do. I have attached a link to my site so you can see what I mean.
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Please help with any ideas or dos and don’ts
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http://dandlphotographers.smugmug.com/gallery/8266485_LDVMC#541355053_ctjTw

Tim Kamppinen

Wood wrote:

I’m very new at this and I just put my first set of photos up for sale. However I noticed when I go to order some of the photos, it will request that you need to crop them. And that’s ok, however when it requires you to crop them you can’t get the full photo in the crop. I’m not sure what I need to do so the image is all there. This may be basic stuff but I need to know what to do or where I can read on this to see what not to do. I have attached a link to my site so you can see what I mean.
<o:p></o:p>
Please help with any ideas or dos and don’ts
<o:p></o:p>
http://dandlphotographers.smugmug.com/gallery/8266485_LDVMC#541355053_ctjTw

Well, if you're trying to make a print that's a different aspect ratio (basically, a different shape) than the image you're starting with, you're going to have to cut some of the image off to make it fit. The only other way to do it would be to compress or stretch the image to fit the new shape, which would look weird and awful. That's just the way printing works. It's like a movie on DVD. The film it was shot on is a wide rectangle, and a normal TV is a rectangle that's not as wide, closer to square. If you want to watch the DVD in fullscreen mode, you're going to have to cut off the edges of the picture.

If you want to have many possible crops without cutting off important parts of the photo, the only thing you can do is shoot your images "loose" so there's some space around the subject to allow for cropping.

BTW, your post is hard to read, what with the black text on the dark gray background...

Phyxius

Wood,
Here's some great info regarding your options with cropping -> http://smugmug.com/help/cropping

You can shoot and/or crop your photos with enough room to allow the crop of different aspect ratios or crop for max quality but keep the original to replace with (be sure to make sure that you check the crop on the replacement photo if you do this) or you can only offer print sizes that fit the aspect ratio of your photo.

Smumug also offers a no crop option which ads white bars to your photo similar to the letterbox bars on movies.

I do equine sports photoraphy and generally when I'm cropping my photos for upload I try to keep the images with landscape orientation at a 2:3 ratio and images with portrait orientation at a 4:5 ratio. This gives me a little extra room to crop without having to go back to the original.