Figure 1

My wife Dorie was standing in line at a local drugstore and overheard a customer complain about his photos. He asked, “Why is their head chopped?” The clerk told him the photo technician was off but could help him tomorrow.

As I walked up to Dorie, she told the customer that I was a professional photographer and could probably help. Many years ago, I managed a one-hour photo lab in Texas, where customers were asking this same question almost daily.

Figure 2 – This is an 8×10 crop of the Figure 1 photograph

Missing heads (and other disappearing objects) are standard when making prints. The reason? Digital cameras create pictures of a particular shape and a height-to-width ratio. When we order prints, say a 4 x 6 or an 8 x 10, the body or ratio is different for each size image.

Unfortunately, the machine that prints the pictures doesn’t know how to crop the images in the best way because it’s a machine — so heads go missing from the edges of our photographs. To overcome this problem, photographers need to understand that parts of our photos will be cropped off and allow for this when we make the picture.

An aspect ratio is the relationship of an image’s width to height. For example, Digital cameras produce files with an aspect ratio of 4:3 or 2:3 in most cases. But standard print sizes have different aspect ratios. For example, a 4 x 6 print has an aspect ratio of 3:2; an 8 x 10 has an aspect ratio of 5:4.

To avoid having people arbitrarily clipped by your software or photo printing service, you should crop the photo to the correct aspect ratio, the way you want it to look, before printing. Most of the newer software will have preset aspect ratios for standard photo print sizes in the crop tool.

In Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, for example, you can enter the height and width in the options bar before making a crop selection to crop to a specific aspect ratio — but avoid putting a number in the resolution field if you don’t want the image re-sampled when you cut it.

If you don’t have Photoshop, try using a lab such as PPRPix. Labs of this nature have the software you use through your Web browser to crop before you order your prints. This software has a crop-and-preview tool. It allows you to see crops instantly of all photo sizes. Since Photoshop costs more than $600, this free tool can be a great option, particularly for photographers just starting.