How to make non-standard photo standard size

Question

I have photoshop and wonder if I can solve this using that programme.

We had a photoshoot done and the photographer has resized all the images to non-standard sizes. I would ike to get them printed at standard sizes 10x8 and 5x7 etc. Therefore, how to I basically add white to the edges of the photos so that the image is not distorted, to make them standard size for printing?

The people in the image are quite close to the edges of the cropped pictures, so white needs adding to the edges to make them standard sizes. Thank you.

Answer 1

If you get photos printed, it might not be necessary to do anything. Usually, if they don't fit, they will just have a different (shorter) width, which seems preferable to a white edge.

Some printing services let you specify how you want to fit the images in the paper size: whether you want them cropped or with borders.

Answer 2

In most cases, there is nothing to do. When you print something, the usually default it uniform scale to fit which will scale the image preserving its aspect-ratio until it fits the desired paper size. Since paper is normally white, the parts where the image is not printed will remain white. This is sometimes called letter-boxing. Should you be not doing the printing yourself, tell the person doing it to letter-box or scale to fit them.

Some automated printing system which as photo-kiosks in pharmacies oddly default to scale-to-fill which scales the image until the paper is filled edge-to-edge with the image. If the aspect-ratio of the image does not match the paper, this causes two sides to get cropped.

To get around this you must create an image of the aspect-ratio at which you intend to print. This is simple in most imaging program. In Photoshop for example, you simply create a new file having the desired aspect-ratio than paste your image into it. Resize and move as you like, then save. You will be able to scale-to-fill on your own or leave white space all-around if you choose.

Answer 3

Probably the issue is that camera images and print paper are simply different shapes.

Digital cameras are mostly either 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio (image Shape). Shape is different than Size. Regardless of size, 3:2 is 1.5x longer than wide, and 4:3 is 1.33x longer than wide. These are shapes.

Standard print paper Shape is 8x10 (1.25x longer than wide) or 5x7 (1.4x longer than wide) or 4x6 (1.5x longer than wide). Most often simply a different shape than our image.

So, we generally always have to first crop the image to match the desired paper shape. Necessary knowledge for all of us. More detail at http://www.scantips.com/lights/resize.html

You might ask the photographer if he can furnish uncropped images. But possibly he already did, and instead cropped in the camera when shooting, and just stood too close to allow proper printing. And the camera shape rarely matches paper shape.

You want the image wider. Normally that means careful tedious editing to fill in width of the proper colors to match the background.

However, you said White, which will be very easy in Photoshop. Just use menu Image - Canvas Size (Canvas size is the paper size). You can change dimensions to be Pixels, Percent, or inches however you want to work (but this is relative to the size it is now). Type in new dimension of the paper for the dimension you want wider. Or a pretty wide dimension, and you can crop that later. Leave the Anchor (alignment) dot in the center and it will on both sides. The fill color is specified as Background Color or Foreground color, but you can specify White there.