Papa j Loc: Cary NC

I made 2 attempts at sending several photos to shutter fly and cvs for printing most came back to my satisfaction but several came back with legs and heads chopped off. Is the a way I need to send Lightroom processed photo for prints
Thanks
Joe

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Yes, crop the image in LR to exactly match to the requested print size and aspect ratio. For example, a 3x2 image won't print to 10x8 unless some of the original image is cropped away. Either you do it to your specifications, or hope for the best in whatever happens on the printer's side.

Papa j Loc: Cary NC

I selected 4x6 in the crop box


J

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

The absence of relevant details will force us to guess. If you want something other than guesses, tell or show us specifically what you did. What was the aspect ratio of the image? Better yet, post it and store the JPEG file. Then, show the resulting print, possibly with a ruler showing the print size.

Papa j Loc: Cary NC

I will later

Thanks

photoman022 Loc: Manchester CT USA

what he said!

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Aspect ratio mismatches cause this.

If you want an 8x10 and your image has a 2:3 aspect ratio, a machine printer will whack an inch off of each end of the image unless you PAD the CANVAS with white or some other color pixels.

For instance, your image might be 2000x3000 pixels. If you want all of it on an 8x10, you need to add 400 pixels to the narrow side to make the image 2400x3000 pixels.

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

If you selected 4x6 in LR crop, and you are having prints made that are on 4x6 paper, then you should be good to go.....

. . . or are you telling us that you did this and that the print still came out wrong.

fetzler Loc: North West PA

I some times us Adoramapix (now Printique). You may choose paper of the right aspect ratio for your picture(e.g 8 x12 in for a image with 3:2 aspect ratio). They will also print the full image on any size paper. There will be borders. A printer that won't do this is someone I won't do business with.

In photoshop you can create a blank canvas of the right size and aspect ratio. Its color could be white, black or any other color. Place your image on this canvas. Of course there will again be borders.

Gallimaufry Loc: Denver, CO

Papa J, you said you selected 4x6 in the crop box. But you didn't say in whose crop box.

Did you actually crop the photo in LR to be a 4x6 photo, or did you merely select 4x6 crop in the printer's submission form? This matters because CHG CANON and Burk photo are correct. The printer will have to guess what you wanted if your photo's aspect ratio is not 4x6 to begin with when you submit it unless you specify a border is ok.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

I'll chime in, since I ran a pro portrait lab's prep and print areas for a time. Part of this is reminiscence, and part is modern perspective, but some may find it interesting.

Many professional labs make what they (still) call "machine prints*." These are made on automated systems, often using output from some remote order entry system that runs over the Internet on your computer. They take whatever you give them. If it does not fit the print size you ordered, it gets cropped, *unless* you order a CUSTOM print. In that case, they intervene and fit the image to the paper by padding the canvas, leaving some of the paper blank. But they usually charge for that! Or, you can do the same work and send them an image that fits the digital print canvas as I described in an earlier post.

The same goes for color correction. If you send the lab an uncorrected image, say, dark and red, it prints "as is," unless you pay for someone to run it through a calibrated color correction station and adjust it (to THEIR taste, of course). But of course, you can calibrate and profile your monitor, install the lab's printer profile for soft proofing, and do the color and brightness adjustments exactly to your tastes...

*In the "optical, printing from film" era, pro labs had many different types of machine printers. The lab I worked with had over 100 large, clattering printers. Some printed 500 foot rolls of paper from 100 foot rolls of negatives, had many custom configured "lens decks" to project images at different sizes on the same sheet of paper, and they cost millions, collectively. We built them (and rebuilt them several times) ourselves, from off-the-shelf parts. The final versions of them printed automatically, using order edit information sent over a lab network. The film had a code punched across the blank areas between negatives that linked each negative with a record in the order database...

Some of our printers used carded, retouched negatives. We had size A through F (openings) cardboard film masks, which were assembled with single negatives at an editing or retouching station. The printers these went into had manually interchangeable lens decks, so they could be used to print 35mm perforated film, 35mm, 46mm, and 70mm unperforated portrait films, plus 6x4.5, 6x6, 6x7, and 6x9 formats from 120/220 roll films. Each size negative had a specific set of lenses to print specific sizes of paper!

Then we had hand enlargers for custom prints, including one military surplus 10"x10" Omega! We had dedicated printers for making 16x20s, 20x24s, and 20x8 panoramas from 120/220 formats. We had five or six Kodak 'S' printers set up exclusively for senior portraits and greeting cards.

We had numerous contact roll printers for making small prints from 35, 46, and 70mm 100' long roll films. We had "reduction printers" for making 35mm size prints from 46mm film. We had four APAC contact printers with roll paper feed, for making school composite prints. Those were complicated, labor-intensive products to create manually!

All but the hand enlargers made what we called machine prints on 500' long rolls of paper that we slit from Kodak 5600-foot, 40-inch wide master rolls! The enlargers were used for custom prints on sheets of paper. We had three giant PAKO processors that ran roll paper at 32' per minute. We had several sheet-fed roller transport processors for black-and-white and color custom prints. In the school portrait heydays of the mid-1980s, we went through 30 to 50 master rolls of portrait paper every "Fall" (about August 15 through December 20, with the big peak in mid-September through Halloween).

Needless to say, we were all happy as pigs in mud when we replaced all those old machines in the early 2000s with Noritsu mini-labs and a few wide format Epson inkjet printers. Of course, we had to build the network of PCs and Macs running our own custom software that drove modified Kodak lab software, but that was worth it... shipping bits (digital image files) around at the speed of light beats pushing atoms (rolls of negative film) around on rolling carts to five different printers for five different products, scratching the hell out of it all the way...

(Sorry, had a nightmare about this last night!)