Cropping for printing.

shaylou

shaylou

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Shayne
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For a long time I would edit a picture and crop it just how I thought it looked the best without even considering printing. Sense then I learned a little about how you crop for a certain size print via light room. My question is, sense I didn't use the crop method for printing do I have to go back and re crop those shots or will they be ok for print the way they are. I guess I'm trying to figure out how the whole crop thing works too.

Thanks for your help.
 
Sorry Shayne, but I really don't understand the question. You crop the image how you like it ... and then you print it. What's the problem?
 
If you have applied a crop in the develop module then this will carry across to the print module. So if you have cropped an image to say 1:2 and print that in a 5 x 7 template you will have a large border around it. Lightroom does have a zoom to fit option which may help. However you did a crop to make the image look right. so changing the crop to fit a pre determined print size tends to affect the way the image is perceived by the viewer . Don't get hung up on the standard print sizes. If an image doesn't fit a standard print size don't worry about it. You don't need to fill all the print area with image.

But if you do want to fit it to a standard print size, then in Lightroom make a virtual copy. remove your crop and apply a standard print size crop
 
Sorry Stewart I was afraid that I was not explaining it clearly.

Thanks Chapper for the info and understanding my poorly explained question. Lol. I'm glad to know that because I have been making pictures for so long yet I have never printed one. I really want to display my work so it's time for print. I can't imagine having to go back and recrop all those shots so it's nice to know I don't have to.
 
If you have cropped for compositional and aesthetically pleasing reasons and that crop is not a standard print size then so be it! Just bear in mind that some printers may if they use automatic systems resize it to fit the paper ~ granted I have not heard of that very often but just be sure that whoever you send the file to for printing will print it "as is" and not mess with its ratio!

FWIW I had some prints made of such crops and the only hurdle for me was getting non standard mattes/mounts to take them. These by the way were Giclee (inkjet prints not C type ones done on say a Fuji Frontier).
 
At least yo used lightroom and can go back and recrop, when I started I did this in photoshop and only saved the flattened jpg !
There are some labs that will print and frame custom sizes but that will not be a cheap solution.
 
surely another consideration when cropping is the quality of the print from a cropped image if you crop a lot of the image out then the remaining pixels may not be enough to get a good print. is ther a guide to this sizing for prints as a i think id like to use it myself
 
billozz said:
surely another consideration when cropping is the quality of the print from a cropped image if you crop a lot of the image out then the remaining pixels may not be enough to get a good print. is ther a guide to this sizing for prints as a i think id like to use it myself
Click to expand...

The only crib sheet guide that nicely(?) list crop ratio, picture size and then pixel dimensions at minimum and best (150 and 300ppi respectively) I came across was this on dpchallenge http://www.dpcprints.com/help.php?faq_id=61 (Mods I do hope such a link is AOK as it does 'address' Bill's question?)

HTH :)
 
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