Q&A: How Do I Crop Pictures for Printing?

I am an amateur-beginner digital photographer, and one thing that currently perplexes me about digital photography is the width to height ratio. Recently I wanted to have some holiday photos printed, and was forced to manually crop them all to the 2:3 ratio that the photo lab uses. I'm sure you know how painful it is to crop to exact measurements manually. A friend of mine had photos printed without adjusting the ratio, and got ugly blank strips on two parallel sides. Is there any way to set the ratio in the digital camera before taking the shots? Or do you have any other helpful hints?

--Lana Stevic, South Africa

In the old days of digital photography--say, 2001--you would indeed have to manually set the crop for all of your pictures manually. I remember cropping pictures to 8 by 10 in those days, and it drove me to the very brink of insanity.

These days, Lana, all of the top image editing programs let you specify a ratio for your crop. When you resize the cropping box within your picture, it keeps the ratio ideally suited to whatever print spec you are interested--2:3, 5:7, 8:10, or wherever. I highly recommend upgrading to a program like Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 or Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 for just this reason. When I looked them up at PC World's Product Finder, Paint Shop Pro 8 and Photoshop Elements 2 were selling for between $80 and $90.