How Often Do You Crop?

BigAl007 wrote in post #18225804
Wilt can you not get any panoramic aspect ratios from your lab? I ask because both of the Pro labs that I use, mostly DS Colour labs, but also Whitewall, both offer panoramic format prints. For example for C-Type prints from DSCL they offer prints up to 12" wide on the basic machines, so as standard you can order 24/30/32/34/36×12 prints, as well as 28×11. I'm pretty sure the 28×11 is also printed on 12" paper, and may or may not need cropping by you. I've had them do a 24×12 for me in the past, and it came out really well. The only problem is getting it framed, as it needs a custom frame/mat to look the best.

Personally I usually stick to 3:2 for my images if I am posting them online, but I am also happy to use other ratios, including custom ones if it makes sense. I usually print at 16×12, since I can get OK plain wood frames at 20×16 complete with a mat for 16×12 for only £7.50 each. They used to be glass fronted, but are now perspex. With the cheap frame, and the prints only costing £1.20 each, including our 20% VAT sales tax, plus £4.50 standard delivery, which is usually next day including saturdays, even on my disability benefit I can afford to have plenty of framed prints on the wall. For many of my aviation subjects I am often focal length limited, even at 600mm, I would need a 900mm lens to come close to filling the APS-C frame for a lot of my shots. So yes I do need to crop a lot of images.

Alan

It's sometimes cheaper to order a "standard" size with white space than a panoramic size. You can cut it down, or just hide it behind the mat.

BigAl007 wrote in post #18225804
Wilt can you not get any panoramic aspect ratios from your lab? I ask because both of the Pro labs that I use, mostly DS Colour labs, but also Whitewall, both offer panoramic format prints. For example for C-Type prints from DSCL they offer prints up to 12" wide on the basic machines, so as standard you can order 24/30/32/34/36×12 prints, as well as 28×11. I'm pretty sure the 28×11 is also printed on 12" paper, and may or may not need cropping by you. I've had them do a 24×12 for me in the past, and it came out really well.

Alan,
I used Whitehall (IIRC, or another big lab that starts with W!) and specified 20x30" print simply because it was a standardized size available from them. The first try they cut the image horizontally to fill the 20" with the image pixels. I had to call them up, to express what I really wanted ("fill the 30in. dimension with the image, blank area vertically is what I am expecting") before they did it that way.
When I talked to WHCC, I simply said "I have image about 3000 x 10000 pixels, that I want to print on 20 x 30 paper to fill horizontally and have blank areas vertically." I asked if a) they would print 3000 x 10000, or if b) I had to provide 6660 x 10000 pixel file...they responded 'B'. I also asked how big they could print, if I wanted file printed to 60" width, and they told me their max dimensions in each direction.

Frankly I have not simply said, "I have 3000 x 10000 pixel file, and I want it printed to fill 40" width", rather than choosing a preset standardized paper size.

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OhLook wrote in post #18225687
Don't upscale cameras let you set the aspect ratio? Mine (G series, prosumer grade) has several choices.

If you select an aspect ratio other than the sensor's native proportions, then aren't you still cropping? You'd just be doing it before the shot, instead of after the shot. At least that's how it seems to me.

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Tom Reichner wrote in post #18225890
If you select an aspect ratio other than the sensor's native proportions, then aren't you still cropping? You'd just be doing it before the shot, instead of after the shot. At least that's how it seems to me.

I guess you can call it cropping when you deactivate part of the sensor, but I understood "crop," in the OP's query, to mean trim the image.

moose10101 wrote in post #18225842
It's sometimes cheaper to order a "standard" size with white space than a panoramic size. You can cut it down, or just hide it behind the mat.

Well at the first lab I linked to, a 30×12 panoramic C-Type print on Fuji paper is £4.75, because it is printed on a 12" width of paper, A 30×20 on the other hand is a whopping £13.99! But when you think about it the 30×12 print is 360 Sq Inches and comes in at 1.52 pence/Sq inch, while the 30×20 is 600 Sq inch and come in at 2.33 pence/Sq inch, mostly because it is much more expensive in regards to materials costs, and the added expense of the wide format printing and developing machines, compared to their smaller brothers. For C-Type prints this lab goes up to a 30" wide roll of paper, but the largest size they offer without going to a custom size is 49×30 at £43.99 pn glossy or luster while the Pearl, Metallic, or Velvet are either one or two pounds cheaper. So it is nice to see that this lab is doing small/medium sized panoramas, up to 12" wide at very realistic prices. I have to say that I expected that most labs these days would offer panoramas on 12" paper at sensible prices, all of the machines are using roll paper so really the only limit to the length of a print is the length of the roll, and IIRC from the Fuji specification sheets that the lab has for download that length is something like 100m. I guess the real limit to image length is the onboard memory in the processing machine, since you would I guess need to load the whole uncompressed image into RAM to print it. I know that Whitewall don't even have such a thing as a "standard" sized print, all the priints they offer are in custom sizes up to IIRC 72"×90" or so. Although the website does have some "standard" sizes listed with prices, to make comparisons easier. So I had kind of thought that other than for paper width, print size limitations were becoming a thing of the past.

Alan

Interesting thread.

I almost always crop for one reason or another.

FreeSoul1987 wrote in post #18225619
Just out of curiosity, and because I am on hold and dealing with Intuit right now so.... I started thinking back in the day before digital, how photographers like Ansel Adams and others would have cropped an image after shooting it and nowadays if photographers do their best to get the shot on the spot, to avoid cropping or if cropping is a normal post-editing task for you, or a once in a while task when necessary.

Cropping allows me to do the following:

• Shoot more loosely so that I can figure out composition later.
  
• Get more material from a single image
  
• Generate different output files in different aspect ratios later