Dodgy Digital Photo Printing

TerryMac_3

A little something that you are not warned about when submitting digital pictures for printing

Having submitted nearly 200 photos to a photo lab for printing I discovered an important and little-known fact about most digital cameras - they create pictures with different photo dimensions, and thus a different aspect ratio, than 35mm film cameras. Your digital camera pictures are taller than those you take or used to take with your film camera. This makes a difference to what eventually ends up in your prints and you should keep it in mind when composing your digital photos. To fit your digital photo into these dimensions, something has to be cropped away, and if you framed your photo tightly to maximize the impact of the subject, you may lose something you wanted in the photo.

The dimensions of standard 35mm film are 36 x 24mm, which translates into an aspect ratio of 3:2. In contrast, typical digital camera photo dimensions range from 640 x 480 pixels, 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 960 for standard 1 megapixel (mp) cameras, to 1600 x 1200 for 2mp cameras, 2048 x 1536 for 3mp cameras, 2272 x 1704 for 4mp camaras, and 2560 x 1920 for 5mp cameras. All of these dimensions translate into an aspect ratio of 4:3. Digital SLRs have a similar aspect ratio to 35mm SLRs, so this isn't an issue.

I have used Klick, Jessops and Morrisons and none have any warning to the consumer that inappropriate cropping may occur. When I pointed out this anomaly to the staff at Klick, the manager was very concerned and interested. She called her customer services department for some technical advice on the matter and was told that 'digital pictures are square but have to be turned into a rectangle for printing'. Neither of us was amused or impressed by this patronising explanation. Jessops, who should know better, told me that I would have to used their computer terminal to crop each image. I don't know about you, but cropping 179 pictures before printing seems a little tedious.

Bonusprint (http://www.bonusprint.co.uk/) offer digital sizes and standard sizes yet none of the above do. This is because it is more convenient for the high street vendors to process all pictures through, what is effectively, a 35mm lab.

lipidicman

Very true. We always crop our pictures to 3:2 for printing. You can always do better than that which you quickly judged in the viewfinder. Yes its a pain, but we only print the gems. If you want to avoid this then 4:3 printing is great.

Reaper

I think the problem is that digital cameras produce photos aimed at the aspect ratio of a computer or TV screen, which is not the standard 6" x 4" photo size.

On my camera there is an option to take standard or "photo" sizes, have a check on your camera to see if it has the same. By selecting photo you not only get what you take but it uses less memory space too as it has cropped some of the photo.

I notice the well respected PhotoBox (often rebranded under other names) give the option of 6" x 4.5" at no extra cost. I think that is the correct size for digital camera shots. Prices start at 7p if you prepay in bulk.

lipidicman

The "photo" size shows you the crop in the camera viewfinder/lcd I assume - what a great idea - I would use this the whole time. Wider shots are much better than 4x3.

As I see it 4x3 is dead in TVs, some laptops - how much sense do 4x3 snaps make?

Altarf

Picasa (the free image storage and editing tool from Google) has templates built in for you to crop your photos to the common print sizes. What is nice is that it doesn't alter your original picture file and you can move the crop frame around so you pick which bit to lose.

It was recomended to me by the manager on the photo processing section in Boots *before* I had my photos printed.

http://picasa.google.com/index.html

ManAtHome

Klick (claim to) do 8x6s http://www.klick.co.uk/digservices.html (bit expensive for 200 prints though)

lipidicman

Altarf wrote:

Picasa (the free image storage and editing tool from Google) has templates built in for you to crop your photos to the common print sizes. What is nice is that it doesn't alter your original picture file and you can move the crop frame around so you pick which bit to lose.

Yeah, picassa is a 'nearly' program for me. So easy to use. BUT so limited. It really needs to reflect what is on the disk, you need a tree browser and to be able to browse CDs. The library becomes a bit cumbersome when you have around 100,000 pictures to manage!

terrymac_2

Do you think it would be better to have this thread in Techie Stuff (as my father suggests)?

lipidicman

Nah, techies would know this. It started as a warning, and badly cropped pictures (if you aren't warned about them) are a rip-off!

OlympusPhoto

Hi - There are some sites that actually give you this information. One of the photo sites I use is http://www.pixdiscount.co.uk/

They tell you when the photo is digital size (4/3 ration) or other. They even show you if the photo is being cropped and what it will be like so you can decide if you want to buy which format !!

I hope this is of interest

kerrazoo

If you use truprint (https://www.truprint.co.uk) they tell you they can change the size of your digital print to 4x5.3 if you prefer to not have them cropped. I've found their service very good as well. Quick and easy to use. Of course, you might not have photoframes that fit this size of picture, but they at least give you the choice of having the whole picture, or the one that fits your frame.