After trying to crop a photo to the correct aspect ratio for the size I was printing on my Epson 9800, I decided to find a way to automate this. The problem I have ( and I am sure many of you too) is that oftentimes the aspect ratio our cameras shoot in doesn’t fit
popular printing sizes as 8 X 10”, 4 X 6” and 5 X 7”.
At then end, cropping will happen. Here is how to do the post processing and the actions that I already did to solve this problem, free for download.
First I will explain to you the easier manual way to do it. After that I will teach you how to use the action tool to automate it.
Step One:
Locate and open the photo you like to print in Photoshop©. Go to Image > Duplicate to keep safe the original image and crop an exact copy of it. Photoshop will assign the same name as the original image and add the word copy at the end, you may keep this name or change as you want.
Step Two:
Select the cropping tool at the tool panel or type the letter C.
Once you have the cropping tool selected, go to the
preset options tool ( see right image ) and select the size preset you need.
Now your cropping tool will keep the aspect ratio of the selected size for you. Just click and drag the cropping tool to frame the image as you want.
Step Three:
Now with the photo
frame by the cropping tool, you may re-size the frame, rotate it to compose the image as you need. After that press Enter and the final cropped image will be shown.You will need to do every single step above for every image you want to print in a popular aspect ratio or size.
After asking around I realized that lot of other people have had this size problem too, so I decided to turn this in to an action to make it easier for us in the future.
The “Cropping Create” Action
I provide here a Photoshop© action file in two different compressed formats ( zip & rar) for your convenience. The action file has three actions: Create 8 X10”, 4 X 6” and 5 X 7”.
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