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The Digital Domain: Printing Images
This section covers printing your pictures, either on your home printer, or through an online photo developing site. Specifically it covers the technical aspects to help you get the print exactly as you intended.
Aspect Ratio
The Aspect Ratio is the width of an image divided by the height. It does not indicate the size of the picture, just the shape of the rectangle. A value of 1 indicates a square image frame, greater than one is an image that is wider than it is tall (i.e. landscape orientation), and a value less than one is taller than it is wide (portrait orientation).
The table below shows the aspect ratios of some common print sizes:
|
Picture size |
Aspect ratio
(landscape) |
Aspect ratio
(portrait) |
|
6" x 4" (15cm x 10cm) print |
1.500 |
0.667 |
|
6" x 4.5" print |
1.333 |
0.750 |
|
7" x 5" print |
1.400 |
0.714 |
|
10" x 8" print |
1.250 |
0.800 |
|
12" x 8" print |
1.500 |
0.667 |
|
Most DSLR cameras |
1.500 |
0.667 |
|
Four-Thirds DSLR cameras |
1.333 |
0.750 |
|
Most compact cameras |
1.333 |
0.750 |
The closer the value is to 1.0, the squarer the picture is.
You camera will always create images of a certain aspect ratio and if this does not match the aspect ratio of the print size, then one of three things must happen:
- you lose a bit of the top and bottom or the sides
- you will be left with white space around the image
- the image will be squashed or stretched to fit the aspect of your print
The best of these options is the first one, and is what most software will do automatically if your print an image where the aspect ratio of the print size differs from that of the image. However if you leave it to the software to decide, you may find you end up with a few decapitated heads. Therefore we would recommend you crop the image to the correct aspect ratio first (see later section) giving you control over which parts of the image are discarded.
The picture below was taken using a camera which produced a 1.333 aspect ratio (i.e. 4x3). The area above and below the red lines shows what would be lost if the image was printed on 6 Χ 4 paper. The blue lines indicate the region that is lost if printed as a 10 Χ 8 print (which has a squarer aspect ratio of 1.25). In the latter case, we would probably prefer to not lose any off the right and a little more off the left. Therefore using the crop tool would give you the control.
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Photographs
This is a site about photography so I'm sure you are expecting to see plenty of pictures.
For now, why not take a peek at the flickr galleries belonging to the two authors of this site.
Colin's Flickr Page
Phil's Flickr Page
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