Strange dog
Things to know about Photo Printing
Helping you prepare your photos for printing
We offer two different types of photographic prints.
For 6×4″, 5×7″ and 6×8″ prints, we use a Kodak printer, which gives the glossy standard photo prints everyone is familiar with.
Other sizes can be printed on our large format printer, up to 36″ wide (914mm), on a satin photo paper.
Aspect Ratios
An aspect ratio is a proportional relationship between an image’s width and height.
Essentially, it describes an image’s shape.
If the shape of the image you want to print isn’t the same aspect ratio as a standard photo print, we will need to print it a different size.
This is common when a photo has been screenshotted or if something has been cropped out of a photo.
The photo of the woman with her laptop is about 3 inches by 6 inches.
To fit the photo into a standard 4”x6” frame, we need to stretch or shrink the photo.
We can make a photo smaller or bigger, but we can’t change the shape without removing some of the photo (cropping).
When printing photos, we can choose “Fit picture to frame” or “Shrink to fit” for all of them.
If you want your photos cropped, each has to be individually changed, so charges will apply.
Fit picture to frame
This print fills the page, but some detail is lost on the top and bottom, including part of the woman’s face.
Shrink to fit
This print contains the whole photo, but has white spaces on either side, and isn’t the right shape for a standard frame.
Crop (charges may apply)
This photo has been cropped to fit the print aspect ratio. The laptop is lost, but the woman’s whole face is visible.
Low Resolution photos
In digital photography, resolution is the level of detail contained in an image.
More specifically, it refers to the number of pixels that exist within that image. The higher the resolution, and the richer the pixel count, the more detail and definition you will see.
Photos taken on modern cellphones typically have high resolution, which means they can be printed in larger sizes without compromising on quality.
Photos that have been sent to you as a smaller size, or saved from social media applications, have been compressed for convenience.
This means the version of the photo you have received is lower quality than the original, even though it might look the same on the screen.
We can still print these lower-resolution photos, but they won’t look as good as the original, particularly on a large print.
If you only have a low resolution version of a photo, we might not be able to print it at the size you want, without the photo looking blurry and pixellated.
The only solution is to source a higher quality version of the image from whoever has the original.
