How to avoid cropping off your prints
Printing services often crop photographs, removing a strip off all four edges.
A more serious problem may be a mismatch between the shape of the window or frame used at image capture to the one use at printing stage. Cameras use many aspect ratios, ranging from panoramic to square. If you capture an image using one aspect ratio and wish to display it using another, then you have two choices: either include the entire image with blank borders or crop it so it fills the new frame size.
We encountered this problem when we made a 6 x 4-inch print of a picture captured using a popular digital camera. Most digital cameras use an aspect ratio of 4 x 3 (that is, computer screen aspect ratio), but the smallest standard print format uses an aspect ratio of 3 x 2 (the same as 35mm film). If you don’t want blank borders, then you have to crop. If the picture was originally 1,200 pixels wide and 900 pixels high, you’ll need to crop the picture at the top and/or at the bottom reducing it to 800 pixels. See our print techniques article later on.
