printing photos on 4 x 6

[tommyz]

I have tried having Costco or Walgreens print photos from a CD that was burned on my PC and find that all of the self-use machines have pre-set area's that show the picture. I find that some heads are cut off, feet or even width is adjusted. Why can't these machines print the picture as it was taken?
Ritz camera guy says to buy a camera that has an option of shooting image at 3.2 only. He says this is the only way to have the print exactly match the photo on the digital card...this true? I was surprised that the new Cannon SLR and Nikon d70 didn't offer this setting?
Thanks, Tom

[robertwgross]

We don't know whether you misunderstood what the Ritz guy said, or whether he really did say that kind of stupid stuff.

Maybe he referred to 3:2 aspect ratio, which is the aspect ratio used by all 35mm film cameras, Canon EOS digitals, and many others. It is the traditional standard, but there are other aspect ratios used by other equipment.

If you shoot with a 3:2 ratio, it sure as hell is not going to print well on 8x10 paper without some cropping or else very odd margins. The 3:2 ratio works fine, uncropped, if you are printing on 4x6 or 8x12 or 10x15. However, many of us print onto 5x7 or 8x10 or 11x14, and somewhere, somehow, cropping must occur. The machine is certainly not smart enough to know how you wanted to crop the image, so it takes its automatic view of it. Why don't you crop it the way you want and print it yourself at home? That way you will have nobody to blame.

---Bob Gross---

[slin100]

Many labs resize the image by a small amount to avoid any white strips that might appear due to misalignment of the paper path in the printer. Many home printers do this, too, btw.

You can try writing special instructions on your order to disable auto-resizing. Alternatively, you can compensate for auto-resizing by adding a small white border around your image. Then, when the image is resized by the printer, only the border is cropped.

Go to Dry Creek Photo (http://www.drycreekphoto.com) and read this article (http://drycreekphoto.com/Frontier/using_printer_profiles.htm) for details. It also provides recommendations for the border size for Frontier and Noritsu printers.

[JCK]

Have you usewd Costco's lately? Now they have an option to regular prints (4X6 only I think): White bordered. And they look, well, like postcards....

[CoolToolGuy]

This may be related to an issue I need to resolve.

I burned a CD with several images on it. The person that I gave it to said she took it to a place that prints from digital and the machine gave a message that the file was too large. The image could have been from either the Drebel or the 20D. I would like to figure this out, as I will be burning more of these in the future.

Is it possible that the 'digital photo lab' machines cannot handle large-resolution image files?

Have Fun,

[Conk]

When having labs process your images just ask for them to be "uncropped". Simple!

[acertain]

If you have a point-and-shoot camera, your sensor may have a 4:3 aspect ratio, which means that when you print 4x6, you're either going to have to crop .5" off the short side or add some white space to the long side. No standard sizes will match your image exactly, though 5x7 and 8x10 will be closer than 4x6 (8x10 will force cropping on the long side).

As others have pointed out the DSLRs (and 35mm film cameras) have 3:2 aspect ratios.

Andrew

[slin100]

I burned a CD with several images on it. The person that I gave it to said she took it to a place that prints from digital and the machine gave a message that the file was too large. The image could have been from either the Drebel or the 20D. I would like to figure this out, as I will be burning more of these in the future.
Did you set the DPI in the file? I believe the default DPI is 72dpi for 20D files. While DPI is meaningless when viewing images on the computer, it's extremely important to printers. Printers take the image dimension in pixels and the DPI to determine the actual image size. A 20D image, for example, would be printed around 48"x32" at 72dpi.

[slin100]

When having labs process your images just ask for them to be "uncropped". Simple!
It's not always that simple. Some "uncropped" images are still slightly cropped. See my previous post in this thread.

[NILOLIGIST]

I printed at Costco's and all my prints were sized to be 8x10's they came out fine as 4x6's with and without white borders.

Perhaps something is wrong with the sizing of the photos on your CD. Try printing them at home and see the results. Something seems to be wrong there. Costco did an OUTSTANDING job.

Good luck,
NiL,