One Thing to Check Before Your Print Your Photos!

It’s Christmas & if you’re like me, you have family members on your Christmas list who are impossible to buy for. Take for example, my Grandparents – they have literally everything. What do you buy for the people who have everything? If you ask my husband, he just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Do we really have to get them anything?” (insert steely cold glare here)

All kidding aside: we all have those people on our Christmas list who we love dearly – so much that we want to give them something – but what? One of the easiest solutions is to give printed photos! Especially if this is your first Christmas being engaged (gift engagement photos!) or your first Christmas being married (gift wedding photos!) – printed photographs make the perfect gift and they’re always a huge hit!

However, before you run out and get a ton of images printed as Christmas gifts, there is one thing to keep in mind!

Please, check the crop of your images before you print your photos, every time!

Let me explain: without getting too nerdy, photos are taken in a certain aspect ratio (either 2:3 or 4:5, depending on your camera) and when you have images printed, our standard sizes of 4 x 6, 5 x 7, and 8 x 10 don’t exactly follow along with our aspect ratios. Confused? It’s okay, seeing is believing, so let me show you what I mean!

Let’s take this awesome group photo from Laura & Jake’s wedding this past summer. First off, can we talk about the huge group this is & how fabulous they all look?! Okay! Moving on!

This is the original file that my camera produced. If they decided to print this image as a 4 x 6, this is exactly what the image would look like – no cropping done.

After the popular-for-scrapbooking size 4 x 6, comes the perfect-for-your-desk size: 5 x 7. Now, if you look closely, you’ll notice a tiny bit of the image is cut off of both sides. Can’t tell? Look at the door to the left of the group and the bouquet of flowers to the right of the group in the photo above, and then find those same objects in the image below (this is like one of those “how many differences can you find” puzzles!)

It’s still not too bad. So, then we go from the perfect-for-your-desk size of 5 x 7 to the hang-on-the-wall size of 8 x 10. Notice how close the crop comes in on this one? Again, if you can’t quite tell, look at the door & the bouquet above and notice how they’re completely gone below!

Let me show you once again, this same image, but instead of actually cropping it, let me show you with lines where the crop would fall. If you were struggling a little bit to figure this out above, the image below should clear it all up.

The whole reason your images are cropped is because of aspect ratio. Some brilliant mind (not) over at the frame factory back-in-the-day, decided to change up the sizes and make things tricky. So now, you have work to do!

Every time you have images printed (outside of the size 4 x 6) please, check the crop!

No matter where you get your images printed, the lab’s ordering system will automatically crop your photo, and here’s where the tricky part comes in, it’s up to you to double-check that the crop is okay. If I had taken one step closer to this group & snapped this photo, the 8×10 crop would cut into the shoulders of the family members standing on the outside of the group (now you know why I always do my best to leave extra space on the edges of your images, especially when taking large family photos!) Sometimes it simply can’t be helped, but depending on the image, sometimes you can adjust the way the lab will crop the image so the group is more centered or so that the least amount of a person is cut off. You have to take that little bit of an extra step to double-check though!

By all means, print your photos as Christmas gifts!
But double-check how your printing lab is cropping them first!