Printing my own photos

[Booncha57]

I am having a hard time understanding this process. I am trying to print up a few of my photos from home and am getting stuck at the point where I want to print standard mat sizes (5x7, 8x10, etc.). When I try to change the size of the photo to fit one of these mat sizes, I think it (GIMP) has the two sizes linked to keep the proper aspect ratio. It is my understanding that if I unlink the two numbers and change one, that the image will become distorted.

Does this mean that I have to crop every photo that I take to one of these sizes if I want to end up printing them? How is it that people can just send the files to Walmart and have them printed up straight from their camera?

What am I missing here?

Thanks for the help!

[teaking]

It depends what aspect ratio your camera shoots in, and what aspect ratio you want your print in.

In short if the aspect ratio you want to print in is different than the aspect ratio your image is in you have to crop to that aspect. Usualy people will save multiple crops from an image so it can be printed at different sizes depending on what the client wants.

[Booncha57]

Well that changes everything. Does anybody have any tips for composing as your are taking the shot, if you know you are going to have to crop it later? Man, that's tough. Here I am trying to work on better composition before I take the shot so I don't have to mess with it later, and now I find out that I am going to have to trim one of those sides off anyway! Unless I want to print irregular sizes, make my own mats and custom frames. Which I don't!

Thanks for the info. teaking.

Matt

[RecurrentNerve]

Just make sure nothing absolutely vital is right at the edge of the frame; it shouldn't be anyway!