Trouble understanding print sizes

Well, bookmark it and get ready to pass it on to others (pretty much on a daily basis)!

lol thanks for all the advise guys

ChasP505 wrote in post #12123842
I'm just glad the people asking questions like this are doing photography and are not installing floors or doing construction.

Aye, so true.

tonylong wrote in post #12125216
Well, bookmard it and get ready to pass it on to others (pretty much on a daily basis)!

. LOL

American Frame makes very nice metal frames in any size you wish. I only frame 12" x 18" photos, and I have frames from them that work very well and look great. Their web site is:

http://www.americanfra​me.com/

They will also sell you custom mats if you want them.

lbcyalater wrote in post #12119348
I dont understand why I have to crop out practically half my images in order to get it on something that I thought were normal print sizes (8x10, 5x7, 4x6).

Are you sure you don't understand this? It's 8th grade math -- a matter of reducing fractions.

I think you mean that you don't like cropping and losing part of your images. There are no devils here and no relief possible. The laws of arithmetic can't be repealed.

There are several approaches to printing sizes.

Cropping: Personally, I never crop until I have processed whatever image it is to a printable stage. This is primarily driven by the fact that I work initially in ACR or DPP, and I work completely non-destructively in PS in layers - so this may not apply if you use LR. In either case, I bring my image into PS at 11 x 16.5 inches, 360 ppi, 16bits, and they stay that way, unflattened, when they're saved as PS docs.

One really good reason for not cropping or flattening: if you have an image that you want to go back to later, and add, e.g., V. M. Lopes' light rays, you will not be able to add new layers from the original source without alignment issues, and of course, you will only have the final flattened image to work with - though that may be enough. The downside is that images will be large - if you're worrying about saving disk space - well, some of my images are well over a gigabyte.

Image size: It seems to me there are two choices here. You can either fit your image to a pre-determined aspect ratio, whether 4:3, 3:2, 5:4, etc., or you can crop the image to the size it suggests for itself - this implies that you don't always "camera-crop" your image. Since my main lens is a 17x40, this isn't usually an issue - it may be more so for you.

In the first case, you need to find the frames at someplace like Michael's or on-line. In the latter case, I suggest you look at eframe.net. They'll cut your frame to whatever size you want. A simple 17"x41" wooden frame, (random numbers chosen) routed at the corners with assembly clips that can be put together in about five minutes costs $53.20 with hanging hardware. The same frame 12"x21" is $34.86. That's cheaper than Michael's, at least in my experience, except when they're having one of their 50% off sales, which seems to be often enough.

My .02⊄

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JordansDigitalDreams wrote in post #12124187
=Jordan'sDigitalDreams​;12124187]I have a 60D and I can chance my picture ratio if I use live view. I'm not sure about your 50D but if it has it you can set it to a 1:1 ration which fits the 8x10 size pretty well, their are 4 different ratios I can set mine to, might check and see if your's does the same.

Dude you're talking bollox. 1:1 ratio is a square format which wouldn't fit 10x8 or any other common print size without being cropped, which doesn't resolve the OPs problem. Furthermore I'd be extremely surprised if your 60D can produce 1:1 ratio images straight out of camera, as the sensor is 3:2 ratio.

I don't have the 60D but I imagine it has a similar feature to that in my 1D3 -- you can set it to show lines as "guides" for various aspect ratios in Live View (but not in the viewfinder). When you take the shot the image will not be cropped to that but in DPP it shows up in the preview. So, it's just a guide, not a cropping tool.

I can set a "ratio" in my 1D3. 4:5 or 1:1 for instance. It will show cropped in DPP and on the camera display.
Not when using LR for instance.