fun house mirror prints

goldilocksandmy3bears · October 23, 2009

I am really upset about the prints i just got in the mail. I had done a pretty big job for a preschool here where I live. I did the shot w/ the kids laying in the leaves (I had posted a picture a few weeks ago) I stood over them w/ my wide angle and shot down at them. Some of the pictures came out really cute however the others came out looking like the kids were placed in front of a fun house mirror and elongated. What is weird to me is only the 5x7's look like that- the 8x10s and wallets dont- and only in print.. on my computer they look fine. Was the final outcome due to my choice of lens? Being a wide angle did it distort the kid? If so how do you properly use a wide angle when photographing people? Using the other lens I have would not have been able to get the leaves and the kids in the way I was going for.:bash This is so frusterating.
Courtney

RBrogen · October 23, 2009

Hi Courtney,

Typically it is a difficult proposition to use a wide angle lens for any type of portrature given its tendancy to distort/warp the subject unless you get them centered exactly but even then it can be tough. That's not to say that it can't be done but you have to really understand the limits of your particular gear and work within those limts. Here's a couple of links you may find interesting.
http://www.ephotozine.com/article/Wideangle-photography-technique-4753
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/how-to-use-ultra-wide-lenses.htm

What was the lens you used? What were the exifs on those images you had issues with? Was there a particular driving reason to go with a wide angle lens for this particular shoot?

Best,

rainbow · October 23, 2009

My suspicion is that the printer may have "stretched" the shots to fit the aspect ratio of the photo. Do you have a photo that was printed in both 8 x 10 and 5 x 7, whereby the distortion occurs in the latter only? If so, they are probably elongating it to fit the 5 x 7 size instead of just cropping out edges to make it fit the size.

If it looks normal on the monitor, and "funhoused" on the print, I would think printer, and not lens (and you could contact them and ask them to redo the prints at their expense). Good luck on figuring it out. Hope this helps.

Gary752 · October 23, 2009

Question: Did you do any cropping before sending to the printer? I see this a lot working at the photo lab that I work at. People will crop a photo on their computer, then when they have it printed, the head, feet, or both get cropped off for the actual print, even though they are not in the original photo. I tell them that if they need to do any editing at all on their computer, to only do adjustments to brightness or color, and wait to do the cropping at the KIOSK. If they feel compelled to crop before, to at least check the box that says "Keep Aspect Ratio", or if their software allows to specify a specific size, to select 8 x 10. Remember, if you take 1" off the top or bottom, you have to also take 1" off the sides. Probably what happened was they have their printer set to stretch to fit, and this caused the effect you described.

GaryB

goldilocksandmy3bears · October 24, 2009

rainbow wrote:

My suspicion is that the printer may have "stretched" the shots to fit the aspect ratio of the photo. Do you have a photo that was printed in both 8 x 10 and 5 x 7, whereby the distortion occurs in the latter only? If so, they are probably elongating it to fit the 5 x 7 size instead of just cropping out edges to make it fit the size.

If it looks normal on the monitor, and "funhoused" on the print, I would think printer, and not lens (and you could contact them and ask them to redo the prints at their expense). Good luck on figuring it out. Hope this helps.

Oh my gosh you are right on! So should I save the image as a 5x7 rather than a 8x10? They told me to save all images to the largest size I wanted printed. Thank you thank you thank you!

rainbow · October 24, 2009

goldilocksandmy3bears wrote:

Oh my gosh you are right on! So should I save the image as a 5x7 rather than a 8x10? They told me to save all images to the largest size I wanted printed. Thank you thank you thank you!

Glad that helped.

I like cropping my photos myself to the size I will print it. So this week I took team volleyball shots. As PP, I crop and label the same photo multiple times, so that I have "team8x10", "team5x7", "team 4x6", etc. Now I do not confuse the similar photos when wanting to print in different sizes and I control the cropping, not the printer.

Gary752 · October 24, 2009

goldilocksandmy3bears wrote:

Oh my gosh you are right on! So should I save the image as a 5x7 rather than a 8x10? They told me to save all images to the largest size I wanted printed. Thank you thank you thank you!

You never want to crop smaller than you want to print. The printer was right. Always crop for the largest size you intend to print. The problem you have experienced arises when you end up taking a little too much off one side, and not the other, which throws off the aspect ratio. Remember the aspect ratio for a 4x6, 5x7, and an 8x10 is the same. Also, if you crop to a smaller size, then print larger, the photo can possibly look grainy or blurry. To prove this, save a copy of a photo, and resize it to a 4x6. Then try to enlarge it to an 8x10 in your editing software. After that version is saved, zoom in on both to somewhere around 200% and you will see that the 8x10 looks more grainy than the 4x6.

GaryB

Thunder Rabbit · October 24, 2009

Howdy.

Just a quick note. The aspect ratios for 4x6, 5x7, and 8x10 definitely are not the same.

The ratio for 4x6 is .66
The ratio for 5x7 is .71
The ratio for 8x10 is .8

Gary752 · October 24, 2009

Thunder Rabbit wrote:

Howdy.

Just a quick note. The aspect ratios for 4x6, 5x7, and 8x10 definitely are not the same.

The ratio for 4x6 is .66
The ratio for 5x7 is .71
The ratio for 8x10 is .8

Mathmatically you are correct, but in photo printing you are wrong. The difference from the horizontal and the vertical dimension is 2" for all 3.

For those who are unfamiliar with the modes that labs use, there are 2. Stretch to Fit & Fill to Fit. In Stretch to Fit, if one side is more or less than the 2" difference in sides, the shortest side is stretched to fit the print, which results in the Fun House effect. In Fill to Fit, the shortest side is left alone and a white border appears on that side, usually just on one end. So, if you have to crop before printing, as an example, if you crop 1" off the verticle side, then crop 1" off the horizontal side. The lab that I work at uses Fill to Fit, and I have experimented with traditional and non-traditional crops on my photos, so I have first hand experience in what I am saying here.

GaryB

rainbow · October 25, 2009

BroPhoto wrote:

Mathmatically you are correct, but in photo printing you are wrong. The difference from the horizontal and the vertical dimension is 2" for all 3.

For those who are unfamiliar with the modes that labs use, there are 2. Stretch to Fit & Fill to Fit. In Stretch to Fit, if one side is more or less than the 2" difference in sides, the shortest side is stretched to fit the print, which results in the Fun House effect. In Fill to Fit, the shortest side is left alone and a white border appears on that side, usually just on one end. So, if you have to crop before printing, as an example, if you crop 1" off the verticle side, then crop 1" off the horizontal side. The lab that I work at uses Fill to Fit, and I have experimented with traditional and non-traditional crops on my photos, so I have first hand experience in what I am saying here.

GaryB

I agree with Lee that the aspects are different and I believe that it does matter in photo printing. If it did not matter, Courtney would never had had a problem with her prints. This thread is a result of the printer adjusting for the different aspect ratios.

The way I conceptualize it is to take an 8 x 10 crop. If I now want the same photo printed at 5 x 7, I must take off about about a 3/4 inch strip from the top or bottom (or a combination) of that 8 x 10 photo. That is the photo that I will see if I had it printed at 5 x 7 WITHOUT stretching it (or I would get a white border on the top and bottom with none on the sides). If I printed at 4 x 6, I would have to shave off about an inch. That matters a whole lot! The compositions have changed!

Or to put it visually, if I took a group photo that was cropped to 8 x 10 that included the heads at the top edge and the feet at the bottom edge, a 5 x 7 or 4 x 6 print would NOT be able to include both head and feet without stretching the photo (thus resulting in the "funhouse effect").

Gary752 · October 25, 2009

rainbow wrote:

I agree with Lee that the aspects are different and I believe that it does matter in photo printing. If it did not matter, Courtney would never had had a problem with her prints. This thread is a result of the printer adjusting for the different aspect ratios.

The way I conceptualize it is to take an 8 x 10 crop. If I now want the same photo printed at 5 x 7, I must take off about about a 3/4 inch strip from the top or bottom (or a combination) of that 8 x 10 photo. That is the photo that I will see if I had it printed at 5 x 7 WITHOUT stretching it (or I would get a white border on the top and bottom with none on the sides). If I printed at 4 x 6, I would have to shave off about an inch. That matters a whole lot! The compositions have changed!

Or to put it visually, if I took a group photo that was cropped to 8 x 10 that included the heads at the top edge and the feet at the bottom edge, a 5 x 7 or 4 x 6 print would NOT be able to include both head and feet without stretching the photo (thus resulting in the "funhouse effect").

The thing you are failing to realize is that by going to a 5x7 from a 8x10 is, that there is a difference of 3" from each side, and to a 4x6 there is a difference of 4" on each side, so there is NO stretching involved. If you get the fun house effect, and the printer uses stretch to fit, then the only reason it happened, is that during your cropping you cropped off more on one side than the other.

Here's a simple exersize. Next time you're editing a photo and are cropping, look for a check box that says "Maintain Aspect Ratio", and uncheck it. Try and crop, and you will see that you can crop from each side independantly, where as if you leave the check box check, when you crop from one side it will crop the exact same amount from the other. I'm meaning from verticle and horizontal. In Lightroom if you click on the crop tool, and that opens up that section, aside the word "Aspect" you can set it to different sizes and also a graphic of a lock. As long as the lock appears to be closed (locked), as you try to crop from one side, it will automatically crop from the other side. If the lock appears to be open (unlocked) you can move the verticle independently from the horizontal. It's only when you don't have the difference of 2" from verticle to horizontal that you get the stretching (funhouse effect) when printing if stretch to fit is used. If fill to fit is used, then you get a white border on one side. Also, remember you can go from a larger size to a smaller size with no ill effects. It's when you go from a smaller size to larger size that you see pixelation or get the grainy effect. That's why they say to crop/resize to the largest size you intend to print. I crop/resize all of my photos to 8x10, and have printed them from 4x6 to 20x30 and have not had any problems with them.

GaryB

Thunder Rabbit · October 26, 2009

Howdy.

Gary has offered us a unique take on printing different aspect ratios. And while he is quite content with his results, I would strongly discourage anyone else from following his example. It is fundamentally flawed.

In photography, the aspect ratio refers to mathematical description of the proportions of an image. That is, the relationship between the width and height of an image. And the numbers don’t lie.

Rainbow has countered with a correct evaluation of the situation. I have offered a mathematical distillation of the same evaluation. Now I would like to pull the two together.

Gary claims that an 8x10 crop will successfully print correctly at any aspect ratio. This is simply not possible. I will use Gary's examples to demonstrate why.

We will start with Gary's 8x10 and see what happens when we try and print it at 4x6. In the image below, the blue area represents a full frame 4x6 print. The red area with the yellow circle is an 8x10 printed using the fit option.

As you can see, the red image is not 4x6. It is actually 4x4.8, which of course is not 4x6.

Now we will try the same thing using the "Fill" option.

Now we do have a full frame 4x6, but, as you can see, we lose part of our image.

Now we'll try "Stretch to Fit".

Once again, we have a full frame 4x6 print, but, as you can see, the yellow circle has been distorted considerably.

In none of the examples above do we get a proper full frame 4x6 print out of an 8x10 crop. It is simply not possible. The same is true when trying to print an 8x10 crop as a 5x7.

The bottom line is this:

To get a full frame print the aspect ratio of the image file must be the same as the aspect ratio of paper you are printing on. If you want proper prints of the same image at 3 different aspect ratios, you must submit the image cropped to the proper aspect ratios of the 3 different print sizes you want. The numbers don't lie.

fun house mirror prints

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