printing

When you do your RAW conversion and editing, do you size each shot for the size you plan to print or just at time of printing.

Many of my family event type photo we put on CD and take to local retailer to print. None are cropped to size. But 90% of the time my wife just prints them in 4x6.

I size my images for the size I intend to print but generate a copy of the file so the original is never lost. Dennis

I'd just crop them to the right aspect ratio (if needed) but don't downsize them. The printers know what DPI their printer is and can size them accordingly

Doesn't really matter that much if they're 6x4's though.

I only do it when someone orders a CD of digital negs from me. Otherwise, I use the crop feature on the lab website. It's much easier that way.

liza wrote in post #3127405
I only do it when someone orders a CD of digital negs from me. Otherwise, I use the crop feature on the lab website. It's much easier that way.

So if you crop for CD what size do you crop for, and guess this is another step in the workflow

liza wrote in post #3127405
I only do it when someone orders a CD of digital negs from me. Otherwise, I use the crop feature on the lab website. It's much easier that way.

When you crop for the negative CD do you crop a psd or jpg. If in my workflow I have in jpg if I crop the jpg will I lose any image quality

If I understand Liza correctly, digital negatives will be uncropped and unprocessed, basically what comes out of the camera will go onto the CD.

If you're sending your CD to family members to view on their computer screens, then I'd resize according to what size screen they have (windows picture viewer will downsize automatically to fill the screen in slideshow mode). In that case, I'd hedge my bets and resize to 1200px on the longest side.

If the CD is for the print shop, then don't resize the shots downward, let the print shop themselves sort that out, they'll generally do a great job.

Pete wrote in post #3127889
If I understand Liza correctly, digital negatives will be uncropped and unprocessed, basically what comes out of the camera will go onto the CD.

No, that isn't what I meant. I process absolutely everything and then save each image as a JPEG in several different sizes for the customer. You don't lose that much image quality saving in JPEG format. The loss of quality comes from continually opening, editing, and resaving the file. The sizes I crop for are wallet, 5x7, 8x10, and 11x14.

Apologies for my misunderstanding there, I just took "negatives" in the digital domain to be unprocessed shots.

Pete wrote in post #3132748
Apologies for my misunderstanding there, I just took "negatives" in the digital domain to be unprocessed shots.

No, that term is somewhat misleading. I'd never ever give a client a raw file. God only knows what they would do with it! To me, giving a customer a "digital negative" is to give them a processed, resized JPEG file that they can take to a lab without having to do anything more. Most customers know nothing about photography or post processing and just want something they can print easily. I usually include a letter with the CD recommending MPIX and giving them instructions for uploading the files.