Have you ever had a picture you took printed, only to get your image back and have to top of someone’s head cut off?  Well… you can thank cropping ratios!  That’s right, images are taken by your camera in a 4:3 ratio…  what does that mean?   In other words, when you have that gorgeous picture you just took printed as a 5×7 or an 8×10, the crop aspect of that image is drastically different then that of the image you took in your camera… hence the cut-off head issue!

As photographers, we prep for these difficulties when we take images, allowing for crop room around our desired images.  More than that, when we prep our clients images for print, we crop each image individually to ensure the image is printed correctly, with all necessary parts!

To illustrate this, please look over the example below…

In this example, the crop ratio that comes from your camera is the 8×12 example…  see how differently the images are based on the size of the image printed?

Hope this helps explain things a little, and can help you in the future when you print your images.  A little prep ahead of time can save you a lot of disappointment after you pick-up your precious images!