Understanding Aspect Ratio for Printing

Learn how to understand aspect Ratio for Printing, and two ways of cropping your images for prints. By Yanik's Photo School.

Hello, fellow YPS viewers. This is Yanik Chauvin for Yanik Photo School. And today, we’re going to be looking at aspect ratio for printing. Now, above this video I explained in the article how aspect ratio works, actually what it is and how it works so that you can understand what you’re doing in Photoshop and in part two in this video, I actually showed you how to do it in Photoshop. I’ll be showing you two ways of doing it. One is a little bit longer, not that much but just a little bit longer that I’ve been using for a long time and I’ve recently started using the craft tool and figured out that it was pretty much the same thing. So, let’s go ahead and start with the marquee tool. So, by selecting the marquee tool here on your tool bar, the sub menu appears on top here as you can see. Now, what's important first of all is that your feather is at zero, but you really want to make sure that you haven't zero feathering on your selection. After that, the style is very important, by default, you’ll probably be at normal which gives you the opportunity to move your selection any width and height that you want. But what we want is this fix aspect ratio, actually it’s fixed ratio. It’s the same thing and you basically plug in your aspect ratio here in width and height. Now, you can put in if you know them by heart by the one. I know that 5x7 is 1.4x1 and if I do my selection, you’ll see here the space that will be cropped out. Now, if you don’t know them by heart, you can just simply put seven and five or any image size that you’re going to be printing whether it’s 4x6 or 8x10. You can just plug that in and you don’t need to remember all of the aspect ratio, just put in the size of that image. And then select and as you can see, it’s the same space here that will crop out. Now, if that’s not the spot that you want cropped out or you want this centered, all you need to do is click on inside your selection, then hold the shift key down, and then just move it from left to right. You can also use the arrow keys if you want to do that way. And once you have your selection, what you can do is go into your edit menu and click copy or the shortcut keys, Control C and then for a new document, you can go into file new or Control N for new, click okay and Control V to paste or go back into your edit menu and select paste. Now that we have that done, we have our image cropped and ready to send to the printer whether you send it online or put it on a USB drive or back on your card to bring it on the printer either way. You’ll have an aspect ratio that you choose and that’s what’s really, really, really important. All right, that’s the first way of doing it. I’ll show you the second way now. I’ll close that, bring back our image and the second way is with the crop tool. Selecting that, some menu appears here, the crop menu appears and contrary to the marquee tool, it does really work in aspect ratio, it works in exact image size. So, let's say you want to print some 5x7’s you would put in here seven like it’s already there and five and here you have the option or not to put the resolution on. I never put the resolution because I want it to stay at the exact same amount of pixels. Let me just go ahead with my crop selection and as you can see, it removed the same amount as with the marquee tool because it’s the same aspect ratio. Again, you can use your arrow keys to move back and forth or shift click and shift to recrop your image and once that’s done, double click inside your selection and the crop will happen. And you have the exact same crop as used with the marquee tool. Now, the slight difference if I go into image and then select image size, what the marquee tool did was it kept the original resolution to 300 pixels per square inch which made the file basically nine point something by six point something inches at 300 pixels per square inch. Now, the pixels don’t change on here. It’s still the same size as with the marquee tool, 2800x2000 and that’s what important. You don’t want to lose any pixels even though you’re printing small. I just prefer to keep my files. Later on you want to go print it bigger, you can have that file paste somewhere and say these are all my files with this aspect ratio and you know that you can print them bigger after. That’s the thing with the resolution. If she say, well I want a 5x7 and I know that the printer prints it 150 dots per square inch, I’ll just put in a 150, do my crop again, 150 pixels per square inch, put my selection, double click, you see how it shrunk contrary to before and if I look at my image size, my pixels shrunk. I really have an original 5x7 at a 150 pixels per square inch. That’s not bad if you know you won't be printing bigger or if you kept your original file. This will put less that the image size will be smaller and you’ll be able to put more on your card or on your USB drive and that’s probably the only advantage that I see there. I would personally never do that. All right! Now, let me bring it back to original image and I just showed you two ways to get the correct aspect ratio for printing your photos and having total control of exactly where everything is cropped. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. This Yanik Chauvin signing out, see you next time. Bye-bye.