Cropping and Print Sizes

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06Honda

Senior Member
I shoot with a Nikon D7200 which gives me a file of 6000 x 4000 around 5mb. I generally like 8 x 10's as a size for most photo printing. Is their a chart or guide for getting a good looking 8 x 10 by cropping it to look visually better. The charts I have seen online seem to vary somewhat and you can't always tell when uploading an image online to have it prined. But when you pick it up it doesn't always work to my eye. Any suggestions are welcome.

* This image below to me looks fine and cropped slightly to remove some of the landscape to the right and left of the owl. In this case i could just go with the original size or crop it slighty but do not want to crop it so its too small to print out nicely. The light and eye contact on this one is what I most like. This one is 2000 x 1500 uploaded to my Flickr account for sharing purposes only. Cropped only for easier viewing online.

41263877052_b129e80b9a_c.jpg
 
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C

Chris@sabor

Senior Member
Crop the original image the way YOU want to present it or print it. You can have a crop for social media and another version to print. Remember that with a larger print, the viewer must stand or be, further away. This means that some degradation by enlarging the photo or printing with less resolution has little effect on the viewer. There are also several software's that enlarge and help keep the original quality of the photo. Nice shot by the way!
 
4

480sparky

Senior Member
Most editing apps allow you to choose an aspect ratio for cropping. Pick 4x5 or 5x4 (depending on whether you're wanting landscape or portrait orientation). Adjust the crop tool on the image to your liking, apply the crop. Save the image as a different filename.............. then you're ready to print.
 
Fred Kingston

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
06Honda said:
I shoot with a Nikon D7200 which gives me a file of 6000 x 4000 around 5mb. I generally like 8 x 10's as a size for most photo printing. Is their a chart or guide for getting a good looking 8 x 10 by cropping it to look visually better. The charts I have seen online seem to vary somewhat and you can't always tell when uploading an image online to have it prined. But when you pick it up it doesn't always work to my eye. Any suggestions are welcome.

* This image below to me looks fine and cropped slightly to remove some of the landscape to the right and left of the owl. In this case i could just go with the original size or crop it slighty but do not want to crop it so its too small to print out nicely. The light and eye contact on this one is what I most like. This one is 2000 x 1500 uploaded to my Flickr account for sharing purposes only. Cropped only for easier viewing online.

41263877052_b129e80b9a_c.jpg
Click to expand...



Which post-processing software are you using? Sparky's answer is the one I'd have suggested.
 
T

Texas

Senior Member
Even 6 meg pixel cameras make excellent 8x10's.

There's no end of discussion and guidelines about printer dots-per-inch, pixels per inch and print size on the web.
Fortunately there's some simple guidelines that cut through all the complexity.
 
M

Moab Man

Senior Member
I don't know if I'm answering this correctly, but I'm going to give it a shot as to where I think you're going.

1. I try to stay with 8x10 because 8x12 can be a framing nightmare.
2. The owl IS the subject. For this reason I want the owl to be 2/3 of the photo measured vertically.
3. Crop - I liked the weed coming up on the left and the rock in the lower right corner. You could either remove the weeds on the right or leave them. Unlike the photo of the owl on the post, I moved the eyes of the owl down to the third line because the bird is on the ground so I wanted some negative space above the bird. I had cropped the bird higher on the post image because I wanted the bird elevated as it was on a post and not on the ground.
4. Based on what I see on my monitor, because it is an illuminated screen, I bumped up the exposure by 0.14 so that the non-illuminated print will come in at about how I saw it on the screen prior to the exposure bump.

I hope this helps and somewhere in all that I answered your question. If you need help with upscaling your photo because of the severe cropping I have software that works spectacularly and would do it for you.


OwlCrop.jpg
 
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