Commercial printing of digital pictures

[Puck]

Most quickie print labs located in drug stores and such normally print 4 x 6's. This is fine for 35 mm film whose format is 3:2 but for comsumer digicams whose format is 4:3 this means you will lose 1/2" of height of each of your pictures. This isn't a big deal if you have nothing important in the top and bottom 1/4" (the labs seems to center the crop) but it can cut the top of the head off your subject it you have it near the top. I've asked them if they could just print 3.75 x 5 or or 4 x 5.333 pictures on the 4 x 6 paper and they say they cannot.

I have 3 software programs available, IrfanView, Qimage, and Paint Shop Pro 8. I've found in Qimage a crop feature which allows you to decide where this 1/2" crop needed for a 4 x 6 print takes place but it is a rather slow process (load your picture, select 4 x 6 crop, move the crop to where you want it, apply it, save the cropped picture under a different name, load the next picture, etc. etc.). Is there a quicker batch process in Qimage or the other two that can speed up this crop job? I've looked but so far have not found such a feature. I'm just not familiar enough with these programs. Any pointer you can provide would be of help.

[Puck]

I was looking through another forum and found the perfect program to crop a batch of 4:3 format images to 3:2 format. It's a free program called JPEGCrops. It crops my 2048 x 1536 images down to 2048 x 1365 the perfect size for 4 x 6 prints. If you load a directory full of images it will crop them all and you can then just scroll down the page to each image and adjust the crop of each to fall where you want it. Then you save them all to another directory, copy it to a CD, and off to the mini lab you go! Quick and easy!

You can find it at:
http://ekot.dk/programmer/JPEGCrops/

[jamison55]

I thought that my 4x6 cropping problems would go away with my 5050's 3:2 mode, then I tried to print an 8x10... It's kind of like the decision I'll have to make with my next TV purchase widescreen or standard. Black boxes on the top and bottom, or on the sides. It seems to me that the industry is backwards, and that low end digicams, whose owners are more likely to stick with 4x6's, should have the 3:2 sensor while DSLR's should have the 4:3 sensor. Maybe there is something to Olympus' new 4:3rds system...

P.S. High-end Olympus(5050, 5060, 8080), and Nikon (5700, 8700) digicams give you the ability to choose between 4:3 and 3:2...something you may want to think about on your next digicam purchase. As for me, I'm now locked into 3:2 with my DReb.