Photo cropped when printed

I utilize one of the chain drug stores to print photos. When setting up the photos online for printing some of my photos end up being cropped, even though there is plenty of space around the image. For example, a photo of a single flower with plenty of space around the sides/top/bottom/ will still end up having part of the flower cropped. Do I need to minimize the number of pixels, not crop the photo so much during processing, etc.? Any advice is appreciated.
Thanks,
Randall

You need to crop the image to the length X width ratio that the final print will have. If you don't do it, the photo finisher will and probably not to you liking as you have discovered. If that's still a problem, switch to a professional printer like Mpix.com. (There are others, but that's the one I use.)

For example, if you want an 8x10 print, and you want good quality, I suggest outputting your file at 300 dpi. So for the 8x10, you should do your own cropping before you send the photo to print. In this example, your would crop to 2400x3000. For a 5x7 @ 300 dpi, you would crop to 2100x1500.

Thanks. I don't want to seem dense, but in this sentence "For a 5x7 @ 300 dpi, you would crop to 2100x1500" is the 2100 X 1500, does this refer to megapixels?
Also, is there a link that describes the basics of printing out photos?
Thanks again for the replies.

TRACER wrote in post #14638772
Thanks. I don't want to seem dense, but in this sentence "For a 5x7 @ 300 dpi, you would crop to 2100x1500" is the 2100 X 1500, does this refer to megapixels? Also, is there a link that describes the basics of printing out photos?
Thanks again for the replies.

Well, you're close, it's pixels. If you are using Photoshop or Elements, set it to 2100 px by 1500 px at 300 dpi for the 5x7 print. Also check out the suggested links at the bottom left corner of this page, you may find more of what you need from prior postings.

Tracer, you cannot fit a photo whose long dimension is 1.5x times the short dimension, into a piece of print paper whose length is only 1.25x longer than its short dimension (like the 8x10" print)...that is what we refer to as 'aspect ratio'. Do you remember watching the old (10 years ago) 4:3 aspect ratio television sets, and watching wide screen movies on them? Same issue...you had to endure large black areas at top and bottom of the screen, or you had the left and right edges of the movie lopped off.

What we have to do, as photographers, is match the [aspect ratio of the print] being made in the [aspect ratio of pixels in the image file] that we are sending to the printer. If our original photo is 2000V x 3000H pixels, we can get these prints sizes without modification....

4x6", 6x9", 8x12", 10x15", 12x18", 16x24", etc.

But any other sizes will result in pixels being trimmed off, because ordinarily printers 'fill the page' and do not leave large blank white areas -- unless we are extremely insistent...and you can forget trying to get a drugstore printer to comply with that kind of request!

Now it's starting to make sense!
Thanks to all who took the time to reply.
Randall

Tracer--what PP software are you using? The info above is all correct, but I cheat and do it the easy way; in PS Elements the crop tool lets you crop to various pic size ratios--4x6, 5x7, etc. This kind of takes away the calculation work.

I just always anticipate what size I am going to have a pic printed at, and use that crop size setting. That is usually the very first thing I do when I move from Adobe Camera RAW to Photoshop, as it will have an effect on other editing I do. For instance, I often add a very very slight "vignette" (really, nothing more than just burning the edges a little) to many of my pics. If I do that on, say, a 4x6 ratio print before then cropping to a different size like 5x7 ratio, some of the darker edges will get cut off, but only on two sides, and it makes it look uneven.

If you are shooting with the camera storing only JPG files, if you anticipate needing multiple aspect ratios from the same image (e.g. 4x6, 5x7, 8x10, 13x19) it is best to store each aspect ratio with a different name rather than to overwrite the original file! So if the camera made img_0123.jpg, you would postprocess and store img_0123a.jpg, img_0123b.jpg, img_0123c.jpg, and img_0123d.jpg for the four aspect ratios desired, but still have img_0123.jpg so you could use it as your master file.

I use LR 4 for processing. I looked at a photo in LR 4 based on the advice I've gotten so far and it looks like after all my processing is done and I'm ready to save it as a JPEG I have several choices for saving the picture including the ratio.
Randall

No. You can only set the ratio by cropping to a ratio.

TRACER wrote in post #14640172
I use LR 4 for processing. I looked at a photo in LR 4 based on the advice I've gotten so far and it looks like after all my processing is done and I'm ready to save it as a JPEG I have several choices for saving the picture including the ratio.
Randall

In LR ...

• you can define a crop that fits a certain aspect ratio and output a JPG file, then
  
• change the aspect ratio and crop which is assigned to the original RAW file and output a second JPG file, then
  
• change the aspect ratio and crop which is assigned the same RAW file and output third JPG file,
  
• ...ad infinitum, all without alteration to the original RAW file.
  

It was asked about a link:

https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1132002

TRACER wrote in post #14640172
I use LR 4 for processing. I looked at a photo in LR 4 based on the advice I've gotten so far and it looks like after all my processing is done and I'm ready to save it as a JPEG I have several choices for saving the picture including the ratio.
Randall

The various choices in the Export/Resize menu all take you to the same place. If, after cropping you have a 3000x2000 pixels image and you set Width and Height to 1500x1500, you will not get a square image. You will get a 1500x1000 image. The same applies to Dimensions. If you set Long Edge to 1500, you will get a 1500x1000 image. If you set Short Edge to 1000 you will get a 1500x1000 image. LR will never change the ratio established in the crop, because LR will not do differential resizing (resizing one side more or less than the other side.)

One thing that I have noticed in the past when having prints made at Asda (UK Walmart) in particular is that even if you size the image accurately to the correct number of pixels the printing machine actually prints the image slightly larger than it should do and drops a little of all around the edges. The biggest problem with this was that Asda could not tell me by how much the image is trimmed, and that the trimming did not seem to be consistent between prints, even the same image printed more than once. This means that you cannot have a tight crop for fear that you may end up loosing the edge of something important. On one image I had printed it consistently cut at least 50px off one end of the picture, cutting off the bottom of the feet. The exact amount varied between the couple of attempts they made to print the image when I showed it to them on their screen with the feet intact at the bottom of the image.
I know that my Canon MG5150 printer dose the same but it is only 4 or 5px on each edge. They also warn you in the printer driver when you set it to full bleed printing so you know it will happen.
I understand that they want to print a little bigger than the exact Px dimensions would suggest so that the printer won't leave a thin white strip along an edge, but surely the commercial printing machine manufactures could tell the folks ( or publish it in the specifications) at Asda how much extra should be allowed for this trimming, rather than having the poor sod who works in the photo section have to deny that it happens at all. Saying that though when I tried explaining my problem to him he could not understand any of the technical questions that I asked him, all he could suggest was that I used the printing machines interface to do all of my image editing on. I have to say that I stopped using them for prints after that. There is now nowhere local that I know of to get prints made by "photographers" At least when we had a small local branch of Jessops in the town all the staff were photographers, and the young lady who ran the print lab really knew her stuff, and would help you to get the best possible results, as she used it for printing her own images. The Nearest Jessops branch now though seems to be full of sales people with minimal training out to shift boxes for commission.

Alan