Stump the PC Club is a free tech-advice column written by members of the North Orange County Computer Club, which has been in existence since 1976. Visit the club’s site at noccc.org.
QUESTION: I just printed several photos with Adobe Photoshop Elements, one was a 4” by 6” and the other was 5” by 7”. The 4” by 6” that I printed actually measured 4” by 6” but the 5” by 7” print measured 4.7” by 7”. What’s going on and how do I get an exact 5 by 7 to fit my frame?
PC CLUB: That’s a great question. First of all, Photoshop Elements is the most popular photo editing and cataloging software and is available wherever software is sold. It’s currently at Costco for $79.
The way prints are sized for printing has a lot to do with your digital camera. Every camera has a particular aspect ratio or ratio of height to width. For example, one of my cameras has a resolution of 2136 pixels wide by 1424 pixels high which is a ratio of 3 to 2. Some cameras also have ratios of 4 to 3 or 16 to 9. Not only that, some cameras allow you to change the aspect ratio on a shot-by-shot basis. Check your camera manual.
Now, what does all of this mean? It turns out that when a program such as Photoshop Elements prints a photo such as a 5 by 7, it does not modify that ratio of the original unless you specifically tell it to. If you take the 7” dimension and multiple it by 2/3, the result is 4.666 or 4.7 inches. If you chose to print a 4” by 6”, this already has a ratio of 2 to 3 and would print exactly that.
No digital camera takes photos with a 5 by 7 ratio so the resulting pictures are not exactly 5 by 7 as you discovered.
When you print with Photoshop Elements you will have a choice labeled “Crop to fit”. What this does is stretch the 4.7” dimension to 5” and to maintain the 3 to 2 ratio, the 7” becomes 7.5”. If we do the math, 7.5 by 5 is a 3 to 2 ratio. This means that .5” in the 7” dimension is cropped away. You have little control of what gets chopped off and if something along the edge is important to you, it may not print.
All is not lost. There is a solution whereby you can control what gets cropped by making an exact 5 by 7 in the Photoshop Elements Editor. There are several ways to crop an image but I’ll outline one method below:
- Open your photo in the Editor
- Select the Crop tool by clicking it or press the C key on your keyboard
- In the Options Bar at the top select “5 x 7 in” under aspect ratio
- Draw a Crop rectangle by dragging across the photo with your mouse. Draw the largest size that you need to keep over the entire desired portion of the photo.
- Click in the center of the rectangle you just drew and drag it around to where it’s best for your needs.
- Complete the Cropping action by either double clicking inside the photo, clicking the Green check mark or by pressing the Enter key on your keyboard
Now would be a good time to save the cropped photo with a new file name to preserve the original. This, of course, is optional but allows you to create other sizes from the original in the future.
When you select File, Print and select the 5 x 7 option now, you’ll notice that nothing changes when you select the Crop to Fit option. That’s because the photo is cropped to exactly 5 by 7 prior to printing. This procedure works for any file size unless the aspect ratio of the print matches that of your digital camera such as the 4 x 6 in which case it’s not necessary. Obviously, any size can be cropped to remove unwanted areas. - Ed Schwartz, NOCCC member. View his Web site at www.edwardns.com.