This example works with a horizontally wide and vertically short image that is in approximately a 1:2 (H:V) aspect ratio - but NIOT exactly 1:2 and not close to 1:3. I want to ensure that I do not crop the image at all and see the entire image on the paper. I want to create a Fine Art Paper print suitable for me to frame myself (or give to a brick and mortar frameshop).
I choose one of the Planetary Alien Spaces of the Dewscapes / Mizzlescapes genre. It is between 1:2 and 1:3 in aspect ratio. This image, as many others of this series of planetary images, has very non- standard dimensions. If I had cropped the original full frame image otherwise however, it would not have been acceptable to me, so the result is this non-standard format. We need to work around that. I click on in Featured Products the 12x24 Fine Art Print option on the image details page:
The resulting screen is worth showing, because Zenfolio for reasons I do not understand sometimes shows this intermediate screen instead skipping right to the configuration screen. Hmmm... I need to click on 'Fine Art Prints' even though I already clicked on the 12x14 Fine Art Print product. Hmmm...
So, clicking on 'Fine Art Prints' gets me to this page:
This is the page whre I want to be, as it gives me the link to 'Preview and Configure' (I seem to have lots of things in my cart too). I click on the Preview and Configure link. I will always want to do this even to just verify that things are OK as guessed by the computer system for all prints I am ordering. This gives me the following screen:
Uh oh! It looks like trouble! The text says: "Set cropping by dragging orange handles" - but I don't want to crop! Cropping to me implies that I am cutting off (cropping) part of the image! Not what I want. What I want is to get the entire image on the paper. In the above screenshot the light part is the part on the paper (the part inside the orange rectangle is the paper) and the darkened and greyed out part of the image is the part NOT on the paper.
I can right now start grabbing the lilttle boxes and dragging, or I can get a head start by clicking the 'FIT' tab over the image (in the grey colored tabs on top of the yellow hint box). I then get a big head start on what I want as an end product - which is ensuring that I am not trying to print a fine art print edge to edge or with not enough white paper for framing. The result after pressing 'FIT' is:
That 'FIT' action gets the image expanded to so that none of it is off the paper. That is what I want, but I still want to ensure that I have a little white space on all sides of the printed image so framing has plenty of paper under the mat to hold the printed sheet of paper in place securely. The printer will likely add more whitespace for a Fine Art Print, but I do not know exactly how much, so I want to be sure I have enough. I click and drag the little orange corner boxes and click and drag inside the box to move it (remember that the box is the paper) and end up with the following:
This is the fiinal result I wanted. I took a 1:2 aspect ratio paper size, and got my image situated such that I know I will have enough white space around it that when I frame and mat it there will be plenty of overlap of the matting over the paper.
This also allows me to NOT overmat the image. A lot of images look very very nice if I choose to keep the mat back a small amount from the image, showing a peripheral band of the unprinted paper, and I now know I will have that option as well when I frame it or meet with a framer to frame it.
The next example runs through the identical process for a wide and tall image, where again the standard size does not seem to work at first.