photo aspect ratio? About This Page:

[Carousel96]

I took our new camera to DC last week.
I just ordered prints off Snapfish, and the site gave me a message that the photos were take in "digital aspect ratio" and could either be printed as 4 x 5.3 or cropped to fit 4 x 6. I'm not thrilled with losing the tops and bottoms of my pics.

I've never seen this before. There's nothing on the camera that seems to explain this, and like most new items there's no instruction manual with the camera (don't get me started on that!)

I used the default setting of

"L" which says it's "12M 4000x3000 for printing up to A2 or 16x20 size"

my other options were

"M1" labeled as "6M 2816x2112" for printing up to A3 or 13x19 size

"M2" or "2M 1600x1200" for printing up to postcard size -- which I figured wouldn't do great enlargments.

There are also settings for email attachments and widescreen prints, which I ignored.

So --- what does all this gibberish mean, and which should I be using? Or should I learn to assume I'll lose 3/4 inch off the width of my pictures and go with the default?

[WillCAD]

The aspect ratio refers to the relationship between the width and the height of the image or paper. Width divided by height equals aspect ratio.

In order to print a pic on paper and not have the ends get cut off, the aspect ratio of the paper size must be the same as the aspect ratio of the image.

If your images are 4000x3000, then divide 4000 by 3000 and you get 1.33. Thus, yor camera has an aspect ratio of 1.33 to 1 (commonly written as 1.33:1 or simply 1.33). This is a common aspect ratio among point and shoot digital cameras. It's also commonly written as 4:3.

Changing the settings in your camera will not change the aspect ratio, only the number of pixels in the image; smaller settings make the image smaller, but they don't change the relationship between the width and the height.

Example: The 1600x1200 setting. 1600 divided by 1200 is still 1.33. It's a smaller image, but it still has the same aspect ratio, because the sensor in your camera has that aspect ratio.

A 4x5.3 print has an aspect ratio of 1.33, same as your camera's pics, so when you print your camera's pics on a 4x5.3 piece of paper, nothing is cut off.

That's why Snap fish has that odd size in it's aresenal - because many P&S digital cameras have an aspect ratio of 1.33, and if you print a pic with an aspect ratio of 1.33 so that it's 4" tall, it will be 5.3" wide. But if you print it so that it's 6" wide, it will be taller than 4", and the top and bottom would be cut off.

The reason why 4x6 is also offered as a print size is that 4x6 has an aspect ratio of 1.5, which is what most DSLR cameras have (and some P&S cameras). Print a pic that has a 1.5 aspect ratio so that it's 4" tall, and it will be 6" wide.

The 1.5 aspect ratio is a holdover from film - 35mm film negatives were actually 36mm x 24mm; 36 divided by 24 equals 1.5, so 35mm film had an aspect ratio of 1.5. Most DSLR cameras were designed with this ratio in mind, to mimic the 35mm film that they were being designed to eventually replace.

So, basically, don't change your camera settings; leave it at the highest resolution it has. When you want to print your pics, always choose a print size with the same aspect ratio as your camera, and your pics will not be cut off.

[Carousel96]

Thanks. I thought that was how the ratios worked (that photoediting class in J-school was a looooong time ago!) but also thought it was odd that I couldn't find a pair that worked out to 4x6. How odd that a digital camera won't take pics in the standard print format.

[WillCAD]

Originally Posted by Carousel96

Thanks. I thought that was how the ratios worked (that photoediting class in J-school was a looooong time ago!) but also thought it was odd that I couldn't find a pair that worked out to 4x6. How odd that a digital camera won't take pics in the standard print format.

Actually, they do - it's just that there have been multiple "standard" ratios over the years.

Remember the old 110 film? It had an aspect ratio of 1.30:1. Disc film? 1.375:1. Medium-format, which is a high-end film used by wedding and portrait photographers, has two flavors; square, with an aspect ratio of 1:1, and rectangular, with an aspect ratio of 4:3. Large format film, used mostly by studio photographers, comes in a variety of sizes, mostly with a 1.25:1 ratio.

I think there may be two reasons why P&S digital cameras use the 1.33 ratio: 1) Because the old 110 film did, and 2) because current digital image sizes are often the descendants of the original IBM VGA display monitor resolution of 640x480 - which has a 1.33 ratio.

DSLRs use the 1.5 ratio because the basic design of a DSLR is taken almost verbatim from 35mm SLRs of the film days, and the sensors were designed to mimic the aspect ratio of 35mm film. This is also where the classic 4x6 print size comes from.

Some of the other popular print sizes have different ratios altogether. An 8x10, for example, has a 1.25 ratio. A 5x7 has a 1.4 ratio. An 11x14 has a 1.27 ratio. 16x20 also has a 1.25 ratio. 20x30 has a 1.5 ratio.

4x6 seems to have been settled on as the standard size for home photo prints, prbably because 35mm film seemed to dominate for the last decade or so before digital killed the home film market, and a 4x6 print will contain then entire image shot by a 35mm negative, without any cropping. The last 3 P&S film cameras I owned before buying my first film SLR were all 35mm cameras.

This is all a bit confusing, because we're looking at over 100 years of photographic history.

[CinderAbby]

This is all a bit confusing, because we're looking at over 100 years of photographic history

It's confusing but I find it very interesting. Now I can say I learned something new today.

[Dave Marx]

I hate to throw more confusion on the fire, but Will's wonderful explanation just scratches the surface because he's just talking about the traditional still photo aspect ratios. When digital cameras began adding video to their bag of tricks, the number of aspect ratios available in your digital camera has gone through the roof, emulating 35mm silent film and low-def video (1.33:1), 35mm still photography (1.5:1), and high definition video (1.78:1). And sometimes they even toss in 1:1.

First off, the perfect aspect ratio for a camera lens, in theory, would be 1:1. The lens is circular, so a square would, naturally, contain the maximum amount of both vertical and horizontal info taken in by that lens (short of producing a round photo, of course). The trouble is, we humans don't see the world as either a circle or square. Since we have side-by-side eyes, we gather more horizontal info than vertical. Square pictures, therefore, have always seemed a bit wrong to the human eye. Painters, going all the way back to the caveman era, have mostly drawn in rectangular formats. Originally, of course, that meant wider than tall, mimicking human vision - landscape mode. But, a painter drawing a human portrait was dealing with a primary subject that was taller than it was wide, so they turned their canvases 90 degrees to create portrait mode.

When photography hit the scene, photographers wanted to emulate paintings, and for the most part, adopted rectangular proportions similar to the proportions painters had found to be aesthetically pleasing. Basically, if you're going to crop every photo from square to rectangular anyway, why waste film (well, originally, glass or metal plates)? They started using rectangular plates and eventually, film.

So, just about every kind of camera ever designed has cropped off the top and bottom of the info the lens brought in, to create a rectangle. When new technologies were created, sometimes we've followed traditional proportions, and sometimes we've blazed new formats (aspect ratios).

4:3 (1.33:1) is the historic silent movie standard, set by Thomas Edison. Edison's engineers created the 35mm film format.

Some pros in the early 20th century wanted a really compact camera, in part to take news photos on the sly. Rather than get Eastman Kodak to create a new film size for them, they adopted 35mm movie film. As you probably know, 35mm movie film is pulled vertically past the lens, so the sprocket holes are on the left and right side of the image. But for a hand-held still camera, it made more sense to arrange the film horizontally, with the sprocket holes on the top and bottom of the frame. This happened to make it possible to create a wider frame while still maintaining the same movie-quality image size. They settled on the 3:2 (1.5:1) ratio.

So, 35mm movies were originally 4:3, 35mm still cameras, 3:2. When TV came along, they chose 4:3 to be compatible with the existing movie format. It's always been cheaper to blow glass TV picture tubes in circular/cylindrical shapes, not rectangles, so it made sense to use an aspect ratio that was closer to a square.

By the early 1950s, TV was giving movie studios serious competition. And one thing movies could do to top TV was offer an eye-filling, wide screen format. The standard movie aspect ratio went from 1.33:1 to 1.85:1, and CinemaScope went even farther, out to 2.66:1. Among other things, this meant that movies made since the early '50s are cropped when shown on conventional TV.

So... Along comes digital TV. You can make an LCD screen in any shape at all. And with all those wide-screen movie formats out there, it was logical to adopt a widescreen format for digital video, too. It also gave HDTV the same competitive advantage over conventional video that the movie studios acheived back in the '50s. But, why stop there? Why not create yet another incompatible aspect ratio? They settled on 16:9 (1.78:1). Why would they choose something a bit narrower than modern movies? Beats me!

[revral]

Thanks Will & Dave. Definitely learned something new.

[Carousel96]

To further complicate things -- and possibly why the Snapfish message really threw me -- I had made a few prints from the machine at Target. No indication at all there that my pics were anything but "normal." I have to assume the Target prints cut off the edges. Makes me wonder about the photos I've taken on the old camera and printed elsewhere. Maybe I've always been taking at this ratio and just didn't know it.

But I digress....

Considering the length of Will and Dave's answers, I'm just glad to know it wasn't a totally obvious answer

[Cam22]

, Will and Dave! You all are good at explaining this stuff in a way that I can actual understand!

[WillCAD]

Originally Posted by Carousel96

To further complicate things -- and possibly why the Snapfish message really threw me -- I had made a few prints from the machine at Target. No indication at all there that my pics were anything but "normal." I have to assume the Target prints cut off the edges. Makes me wonder about the photos I've taken on the old camera and printed elsewhere. Maybe I've always been taking at this ratio and just didn't know it.

But I digress....

Considering the length of Will and Dave's answers, I'm just glad to know it wasn't a totally obvious answer

Well, don't assume that Target's prints cut off anything. Grab a ruler and check the width and height of your prints from Target to figure their aspect ratio. It's possible that Target's machine simply determined the aspect ratio of your pics and gave you prints with the same aspect ratio, so you never realized that you were getting 4"x5.3" prints instead of 4"x6" prints.

Look at the files taken by your old camera. If it's a P&S camera, odds are that it has a 1.33 aspect ratio; all you have to do is divide the width by the height to find out.