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I've edited my pictures and went to print some of them off and burn them to a disc at a Kodak kiosk, and it is cutting off my pictures. Do I need to change format, or what else might be wrong?

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2  
Can you explain how they're being cut off? – mattdm Mar 9 '12 at 1:19
2  
What size of prints are you making? 4"×6"? And what's your camera? – mattdm Mar 9 '12 at 1:20

2 Answers

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Unfortunately automated kiosks do stupid things. Get a human to print these things and tell him that what you want out because he cant read your mind.

What is happening is that there is a discrepancy between the aspect ratio of your photos and the aspect ratio of the kiosks output.

For example, the most common print is a 6" x 4" which has a 3:2 aspect ratio. If you shoot with an SLR from anyone but Olympus and Panasonic, then your image starts at the same aspect ratio but if you cropped without the preserve original aspect ratio option on you may still end up with something which is not 3:2. If you shot with a fixed lens camera or an SLD other than from Sony or Pentax, what you usually start with is a 4:3 image. To complicate things further some cameras allow you to shoot in different aspect ratios including 16:9, 5:4 and 1:1.

You can do a number of things, only one of which will work for an automated kiosk:

  1. Edit your images to match exactly the aspect ratio of the print size. With Photoshop and Lightroom, you can enter the ratio right in the interface of the crop tool. Use this for the kiosk.

  2. Instruct the person printing your images to preserve the aspect ratio of your images. This will give you a letter-boxed images (there will be empty space at the sides or above and below).

  3. Ask the the paper to be trimmed to the aspect ratio of your images. This may cost more and not an option everywhere but it gives the cleanest results. So if you print a 4:3 image you will end up with a 4" x 5 1/3" print instead of a 4x6.

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Yet another option is to pick a print size with aspect ratio matching the photos (such as 13x10 cm for 4:3 images). – Imre Mar 9 '12 at 10:48
1  
@Imre: probably not an option at the kiosk. – mattdm Mar 9 '12 at 13:57
@mattdm depends on model, there certainly are kiosks that do support multiple formats (the smallest size for 4:3 seems to be 6x8 on this one) – Imre Mar 9 '12 at 16:01
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Specify "Shrink To Fit" or Similar

Many of the printing services I have used have an option called "Shrink to Fit" or something like that. When selected, this will print the image so that it all fits on the paper. This may leave empty bands of white along the sides or top and bottom of the print, which you can trim off later.

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