Printing with borders

VMac

Okay, I know I'm being dense on this issue... I think I must have a mind block on it. I'm starting to get the hang of creating basic borders in PS (I've been using "canvas size" mostly). I will migrate to actions soon, but I wanted to learn how to do it manually first. But there is one thing that really has me baffled.

Let's say I've started with your typical landscape image out of the 20D, which is what, 8x12 ratio, right? If I crop it exactly to fit 8x10 ratio... fine, I can order a print from smug, tell them I want 8x10, and all is fine (nothing gets cut off). But now, let's say I add a border... this adds the same amount of pixels on each side, thus very slightly changing the ratio, and 2 edges will get slightly cropped when I ask for an 8x10 print, no? Or am I being totally whacky here and really missing an obvious issue? :dunno

Thanks,
Vance

mercphoto

VMac wrote:

Let's say I've started with your typical landscape image out of the 20D, which is what, 8x12 ratio, right? If I crop it exactly to fit 8x10 ratio... fine, I can order a print from smug, tell them I want 8x10, and all is fine (nothing gets cut off). But now, let's say I add a border... this adds the same amount of pixels on each side, thus very slightly changing the ratio, and 2 edges will get slightly cropped when I ask for an 8x10 print, no? Or am I being totally whacky here and really missing an obvious issue?

Correct. If you add the same amount of pixels to each side, then yes something will get cropped. If you add three pixels to the long dimension for every two pixels on the short dimension then nothing gets cropped. If you want a constant width border, then your 8x10 ratio crop needs to be slightly off that, so that when you add the extra pixels the ratio comes back to 4:5. Make sense?

cletus

Howdy, Vance

Excellent question!

You're not missing anything. If you have an image that is 8x10, adding a border with the same number of pixels on all sides is going to change the ratio. In the most cases the amount of change is going to be small. For example: If you start with an image that is 2000 pixels wide by 2500 pixels tall, you have your 8x10 ratio. Now add a 100 pixel wide border. The image + border is 2200 pixels wide by 2700 pixels tall. Now the ratio is 8.15x10. So if the print was scaled to fit an 8x10 page, and assuming it's centered, you'd loose a little over 1/16th of an inch on the left and right sides. Not a whole lot of change, but it might be enough to be a problem.

Also, the bigger the border is in relation to the image, the more impact it's going to have on the height/width ratio.

VMac

Aargh. I was afraid of that. Thanks Bill and Eric.

Do you have any suggestions for an easy way do this? I usually don't print with borders, but I have some clip frames that I think might look better if the photos had bordres.

At this point, I'm thinking of just adding the borders on top of the finished photo, rather than by increasing the canvas size.

Thanks,
Vance

BenA2

Bleed/Trim Issue
I hate to have to tell you this, but once you get all the resizing correct, you still have another problem with ordering prints from smugmug with borders. It's documented under "Bleed/trim" in this smugmug help page.

So, unless you have large borders in which you can afford to loose up to 0.25 inches randomly, you will probably not get what you expect on the print.

This issue has given me headaches as well. I tried to ask smugmug about it in this thread, but got no response.

Hope you can find a solution,
Ben

VMac

Thanks Ben. I guess the workaround is to add borders, and have the outermost border about twice as wide as I want. Then make sure aspect ratio is close... and when print arrives, trim as necessary.

Man, that seems kludgy and very inelegant for something that should be pretty common.

Thanks,
Vance