Crop right for printing!?

Frost

This could go either in hardware section or here. But, I felt it probably is more to do with cropping in Photoshop than in hardware or printers.

Here is my question and situation. I'm in Photoshop and just want to crop the image to the closest best size for printer 4X6 or 8 X 10.5 in. I shoot a Fuji S9000 at generally fine setting and many times I have went to print on my HP 8450 printer and it resizes it to fit 4X6 with tab, but ends up cropping off either the top of the picture, or one of the ends.

When I crop is there a rule of thumb in using the ruler at the top/sides for getting the best crop for printing?

Shay Stephens

How do you fit a square peg in a round hole without shaving off the edges of the square?

If you have a square format photo and want to print a circular shaped photo, how do you ensure that nothing gets cropped away?

If you have a mildly rectangular shaped photo and want to print a more extremely rectangularly shaped photo without cropping anything off how would you do it?

The answer is simply that you can't. The two shapes are not compatible. You have to loose something in the conversion of one shape to another.

A 4x6 printed at 300dpi will be 1800x1200 pixels (3:2 format)
An 8x10 printed at 300dpi will be 3000x2400 pixels (4:5 format)

When I crop in photoshop I make sure to choose the right aspect ratio (e.g. 3x2) and make my selection then crop and resize down if needed. That lets you control what gets cropped off instead of leaving it to the printer to decide.

The trick is selecting the aspect ratio and cropping ahead of printing.

Frost wrote:

When I crop is there a rule of thumb in using the ruler at the top/sides for getting the best crop for printing?

Frost

Shay Stephens wrote:

The answer is simply that you can't. The two shapes are not compatible. You have to loose something in the conversion of one shape to another.

A 4x6 printed at 300dpi will be 1800x1200 pixels (3:2 format)
An 8x10 printed at 300dpi will be 3000x2400 pixels (4:5 format)

When I crop in photoshop I make sure to choose the right aspect ratio (e.g. 3x2) and make my selection then crop and resize down if needed. That lets you control what gets cropped off instead of leaving it to the printer to decide.

The trick is selecting the aspect ratio and cropping ahead of printing.

Ah Ha!! on a 3:2 format of 4x6" printed, then the ratio is : width is 1.5 times the height in pixels (landscape) . For the "Portrait" of 4 X 6, then it would be the width (smaller pixel count) time 1.5 to get the length .

On my Fuji S9000 it has some in camera settings. In Fine / Normal mode (just a difference in size due to "Fine" not being as much compressed for jpeg), the pixel count is 3488 X 2616, which won't ever print to a 4X6 in that arrangement. But I could take the MAXIMUM resoution that would be achieved as 3488 and divide by 1.5 and get a "width" value (or height) depending on the view, and get a value of 2325.333333_ pixels, and if cropped that would give the most possible pixels for printing on my 4 X 6 printer paper.

The 8 X 10 is the 4:5 format ratio as you mentioned above. By math then any large pixel count, above example of 3488 pixels (width) would then be divided by 1.25 to get the height (figuring landscape). so on 8 X 10 paper that would be maximum resolution of 3488 pixels X 2790.4 pixels. Only thing is if I print borderless on my printer paper it's actually 8.5 " X 11.0 inches so it's more or less a 1.2941 factor of pixels. Full resolution would then be 3488 / 1.2941 would be 2695.3094 pixels which exceeds the resolution of the camera in Fine/Normal of 3488 X 2616. So in this case the crop has to be reduced somewhat for the dimensions to come into step.

On my Fuji S9000 there are several settings I can shoot in. The Fine/Normal is at 3488 X 2616 as mentioned above (basically a full view shot, crop later), then there is 3:2 mode at 3696 X 2464, a 5MP setting, a 3MP setting a 2MP setting and one for 640 X 480 at the bottom of the list. There is also a RAW setting which captures at 4864 X 3648 in uncompressed mode and you deal with it later. The 3696 X 2464 works out exacty in the 1.5 raio as above.

In my darkroom days I remember dealing with 6cm X 6cm film sizes (2 1/4 square) and you ALWAYS did a crop unless you purposedly wanted square pictures. It was easiest to put the negative in the carrier, and "over lap" the 8X10 paper easel to get to where you wanted. The more you over laped the 8 x 10 easel the more you could play around with where you wanted the main enlargement to show up on the print. 5 X 7 was the same way, and so on. However the larger you went beyond where you wanted to "fit" onto 8 X 10, the more grain you could induce because of the higher magnification on the enlarger board. This is one of the reasons I shot a lot in 6cm X 7cm format, and still do, because there was very little loss to make the 8 X 10 picture as that format filled out the easel perfectly. You had to be a lot more precise on you framing during the shot because of that since there was only the ability to go larger, which sort of defeated the purpose of that film format to begin with.

Anyway, back on the subject I happen to think of a great idea. In the darkroom you could have the negative enlarged to the extra size you needed to fit and crop and simply move the easels around with your hands to position it to the area you wanted to have printed. It was simple croping. Where ever it moved to, was it. Period. Well, with digital, would it not be nice to have the full size image availabe, and say you KNEW you were going to make a 4 X 6 print from it, and you wanted the most flexibility with the least amount of fuss, and your best resolution of saving? What if there was a drop down menu with an overlay mask for "cropping for pinter"? And with that mask you could choose, 4 X 6, 5 X 7, 8 X 10, 8.5 X 11, etc etc.. and then you got a "mask outline" on the picture. THEN, let's say for example you wanted to do 4 X 6. You would choose the 4 X 6 mask, and click OK, and it would appear on the Photoshop picture image as a colored overaly that was ONLY resizable from the corners. No top, no bottom crop, only corners, *thus keeping the 3:2 aspect ration intact. Then you could use the hand icon to move it around on the picture in any direction where you wanted. You want to crop more to reduce the size to just the one item to print, no problem, just resize one of the corners and use the hand to move it around OVER the area that you want for a final crop. If you wanted to crop a "landscape" image to just be a "Portrait" crop was left you would simpy resize it small on the one end and larger on the other to be a "right-side-up" Portrait crop on basically a horizonally viewed picture. Click "CROP" and then save the image. When sent to the printer no resizing would be needed, cat ears woud not be cut off, building tops would not be shaved flat, and you would print exactly what you saw in Photoshop.

Perhaps this already exists and I just don't know about it, but the abilty to move the mask around would be very useful I think.

XO-Studios

Photoshop 2 choices.

1) The crop tool, chose a size to your liking and off you go there is even an adjustable overlay color.

or my favorite

2) Use the rectangular marquee tool, and set options to fixed aspect ratio, set the aspect ratio to whatever size you want and again, of you go.

I personally crop for every size ordered or every size that needs printing, I sometimes even cheat and stretch or shrink the width a little to get my picture to better fit the print size.

FWIW,

XO,