Make prints from your digi-cam at photo finishers

Digi-cams (not DSLRs) usually takes pictures in an aspect ratio of 4:3, however, most popular size for photo prints in North America is 4x6 inches, which has an aspect ratio of 3:2. Therefore, pictures from digi-cams cannot fit the paper perfectly, one either have to crop the pictures to 3:2 ratio or leave the 2 sides of the prints blank (you can trim them off when you get the prints in your hands) and only use a portion of the paper for the pictures.

For some reason, almost all photo finishers choose to crop the pictures, some do the cropping automatically. Maybe this was coming from film days, most cameras did not have a 100% view of the scenes, so people left plenty of spaces around, which allowed cropping. This is very annoying for digi-cam users because they can easily see that some part (sometimes are important parts such as a head, an arm, etc.) being cropped out in prints. To avoid this nuisance, I always resize my pictures to fit only the width of the prints, and leave the 2 sides along longer direction blank. At the beginning, I was using photo editing software to do this as I also needed to adjust color balance, sharpness, etc. for the prints. As my pictures need less tweaking recently, this method gets cumbersome. So I moved back to a command-line tool ImageMagick to do this. You can do this resizing in just one line of command:

convert original.jpg -resize 1800x1200 -background white -gravity center -extent 1800x1200 -quality 100 print.jpg

In this example, the original picture from digi-cam is original.jpg, and the output file is print.jpg. I resized the picture to 1800x1200 because photo finishers almost universally recommend 300 DPI resolution as optimum. The blank area is set to white in this example, you can change to other colors you prefer, such as skyblue, etc. As far as I know, this tool is available both for Linux/BSD and Windows. This is a very convenient tool, and in fact the quality of resizing is also pretty good. I highly recommend those who have the same problem with prints give this great tool a try.