How do I crop so that it prints properly.

MO
Posted By
Mark_Ortega
Apr 26, 2004
Views
160
Replies
2
Status
Closed
Hello all,
I am new to this forum, and also relativly new to digital photograghy. I have a Digital Rebel and of course along with the camera came Elements 2.0. My question is. How do I use the crop tool so that when I am selecting my pixels the ratio of the rectangle matches the ratio of the particular media print, i.e. 4×6, 5×7 or letter. I know there is a with and heigth adjustment in the tool bar above, but this seems a rather tedius way of selecting your print size, plus when I do change the dimensions for letter size it always reverts back to a different size. I usually select print preview and then go into my printer’s properties to select the size medium I am using but still end up with a picture that does not print on the whole paper. I have also tried to check the "scale to fit" box and it seems not to help. I have a Canon i9100 photo printer.

Thanks in advance,

Mark Ortega
Related Tags
crop how print proper

Must-have mockup pack for every graphic designer 🔥🔥🔥

Easy-to-use drag-n-drop Photoshop scene creator with more than 2800 items.

CS
Chuck_Snyder
Apr 27, 2004
Mark, hello and welcome! Good luck with your Digital Rebel; there are a lot of users of that fine camera here on the forum.

The images taken with the Rebel are in the ratio of 3:2 (long side to short side), so the only standard size that matches that ratio is the 4:6 (or 6:4). For other images, you’ll need to crop.

One quick and easy way to do that is to choose the Crop tool from the Elements toolbox (looks like a square with elongated sides. If you set that tool’s dimensions to your desired print size in inches, then draw out the box around the part of the image you want to print, you should be good to go. You can further refine the technique by adding a resolution in ppi: preferred values for most people are 240 or 300. This will work fine if you are selecting most of the image with the crop tool; if you’re selecting only a small portion of the image, you may get into some serious ‘resampling’ which could result in a less than satisfactory print.

Once you’ve cropped to the desired size, go to the Print Preview and just tell it to print at Scaled Print Size of 100%. Don’t check the Scale to Fit media box. Also make sure your printer setup is correct: right size and type paper, highest resolution print.

Hope that steers you in the right direction.

Chuck
B
Burt
Apr 29, 2004
Another simple tip – Cropping to a 4X6 format or a 6X4 format requires that you re-enter the hight/width to change from portrait to landscape format. If you are working on lots of images in the same session try to become adept at doing all the cropping either portrait OR landscape. For instance, if you chose to crop 4X6, rotate the images you want in portrait mode and then crop them while they are sideways on the screen. This way you don’t have to continually re-enter the width/hight numbers. Another way would be to group the images separately into landscape and portrait so you only have to change the hight/width once during the session. I favor the first method as I go through my images sequentially to be sure I don’t miss any.

When printing large numbers of pictures I print all of them on the printer in portrait mode, but I temporarily rotate the landscape images before printing so I don’t have to change the page setup for the printer if I intersperse portrait and landscape format printing.

Obviously, this is a technique for production printing in the same size (i.e. for my wife to insert into her albums!) and not for very time consuming work on a single artistic effort.

wrote in message
Mark, hello and welcome! Good luck with your Digital Rebel; there are a
lot
of users of that fine camera here on the forum.

The images taken with the Rebel are in the ratio of 3:2 (long side to
short
side), so the only standard size that matches that ratio is the 4:6 (or 6:4). For other images, you’ll need to crop.

One quick and easy way to do that is to choose the Crop tool from the Elements toolbox (looks like a square with elongated sides. If you set
that
tool’s dimensions to your desired print size in inches, then draw out the box around the part of the image you want to print, you should be good to go. You can further refine the technique by adding a resolution in ppi: preferred values for most people are 240 or 300. This will work fine if
you
are selecting most of the image with the crop tool; if you’re selecting only a small portion of the image, you may get into some serious ‘resampling’ which could result in a less than satisfactory print.
Once you’ve cropped to the desired size, go to the Print Preview and just tell it to print at Scaled Print Size of 100%. Don’t check the Scale to
Fit
media box. Also make sure your printer setup is correct: right size and type paper, highest resolution print.

Hope that steers you in the right direction.

Chuck

Master Retouching Hair

Learn how to rescue details, remove flyaways, add volume, and enhance the definition of hair in any photo. We break down every tool and technique in Photoshop to get picture-perfect hair, every time.

Related Discussion Topics

Nice and short text about related topics in discussion sections