BellaOnline Forums Hobbies and Crafts Photography Aspect Ratios and How They Affect Your Prints

Do your eyes glaze over when someone mentions the words aspect ratio? Are you frustrated with losing part of your image when you get it printed at a lab and want to know why that happens? This article will help demystify aspect ratio so you can make better printing choices for your images.

Aspect Ratios and How they Affect your Prints

That's a great article, Ewa!

You can also mention that you can simply mat to the photo you have and use any frame you want. I.e. you can get an 11x14 frame and then mat to fit any picture size that is smaller than that, in any combination. We have a mat cutter which means we can use any ratio under the sun we want. As long as it's smaller than that outside frame, we can create a mat that works.

I'm working on a project right now and figuring out exactly what aspect ratio I want to display. I made up this cheat-sheet for myself.



Luckily I'm printing my own images at home so I can then just cut a mat to fit the size I end up with. That is, I wouldn't want to chop off critical parts of the photo (and maybe destroy the balance of it) to fit into a mat I happened to have.

What print size do you guys tend to use?

I used to do only 8x10 images (or smaller) because it's the most my printer could handle. I now have a printer that can go much larger, so I tend to prefer the larger sizes like 11x14 or 11x17 depending on the image's shape. But in general what I do is, in PhotoShop, crop the image to exactly what I want the image to show. Then I get a large frame, figure out what size leaves me about a 1.5" border on the shorter side, then cut a mat to fit. That way I'm not stuck chopping off pieces of the photo in order to fit it into a pre-existing mat. I chop the mat to fit the photo I want to show.

At an upcoming show the frame size is set at 16x24 / ratio 1.5. That is the size frame all photos will be shown in, for consistency. My photo's ratio is 1.25 - I don't want to chop off any parts of my image to "force" it to a 1.5 ratio. Therefore I'm printing my photo at a size of 12x15, in its natural 1.25 ratio. I then will mat it to fit within the frame. Yes, the mat will have thinner top and bottom borders, but that is OK.

A visual explanation of how changing photography print size impacts your need to chop parts off your photo - which print size do you tend to prefer? Is it one you have to crop to fit?

Great visuals of aspect ratio Lisa! I also print my images the size I want them.