Drastic enlargement when printing Borderless

[Wimpie Swart]

To introduce myself; I work for Canon in South Africa, and do photography as a hobby, dreaming of making enough money with the photography, to only do that.

I have a problem I would like you're advice on:
I have a customer with a Canon MP640 Bubblejet Multifunctional photo printer, he uses the Canon Powershot SX10 iS camera.When he uses Canon Zoombrowser software, he selects 4 x 6 inch glossy photo paper and border less, but this then enlarges the picture to the extent that lots of detail is lost. Please see the attachements.

I have taken the picture to my setup at home, with the same results on Canon Zoombrowser, less over spill working with Digital Photo Professional.I thought of giving the guy my copy of Corel Paint Shop Pro XI, as I do not know how to fully use it, but he would not know either. I tried the program for this particular problem, but I found that if you do not re size the image, then it does not print the complete photo 4 x 6 inches. Thus not an option.

Can anybody please help in this regard?

Thank you

[Jim Poor]

To my weary 4 AM eyes, it looks like a case of failure to understand aspect ratios.

The first image "original" looks to be in something like a 4:5 ratio which makes a 4x6 crop impossible without a change in composition.

[OsmosisStudios]

It doesnt englare anything: the printer crops for the appropriate aspect ratio.

A 4x6" print is a 2:3 ratio. Fairly narrow rectangle. By the looks of it, the camera is shooting in either a 5x7 or 4:3 ratio. Either way, the shape of the image is more square. To get a 4x6 you either have to crop sections (note the top and bottom of each image) or you end up with white bands on the ends.

Looking at the shot of the building, the white section in the bottom is cut completely and the tip of the spike is missing. Looking at the photo of the people, the man's head (on the left) is cut and the image is cropped tighter on the sides.

You have to inform your customer about aspect ratio.

[Wimpie Swart]

Hi guys,

Thank you for the info, I will talk to him on keeping Aspect Ratio in mind.
He fortunately feels he deserves to get 100% of the picture taken; printed on a 4 x 6 inch photo paper, no matter what camera and zoom he uses. He feels the printer is robbing him of information.

Wish me luck.

Thank you again.

Cheers

[drr0b]

The other alternative is to add white space to the photo in order to make it 6x4. For the first photo, you would add it to the sides, and for the second photo you would add it to the top and bottom, The customer could then cut off the white bits, ending up with the whole photo

[karen_s]

Originally Posted by drr0b

The other alternative is to add white space to the photo in order to make it 6x4. For the first photo, you would add it to the sides, and for the second photo you would add it to the top and bottom, The customer could then cut off the white bits, ending up with the whole photo

I second the advice above on adding white to the sides. I tend to be pretty particular with my compositions and found that standard sizes don't always fit the crop I am going for. The above solution, while a bit of extra effort, would work very well.

And I do this for a number of my larger prints. I do my initial cropping (not constrained to any aspect ratio) in Lightroom then export to jpg. Next, I create a standard ratio Photoshop file (say 4x6 or 5x7) with a white background. (You could use any color but this saves my printer some ink since paper is white). I then place the Lightroom picture into the standard sized Photoshop file, resize it to fit nicely (always smaller though), then export to a new, standard sized jpeg that I send to get printed. I end up with a photo cropped the way I want it, it has a nice white border which means I don't have to buy a matte, and it will print nicely at a standard size. You may still lose a bit of the white border as I think most machines with still crop a smidge no matter what you do, but you won't lose the tops of people heads :-)