I am trying to get my pictures ready for print but have a question. When I use the crop tool it activates a menu at the top that says "Aspect Ratio, Width, Height and Resolution" If I type in 8x10 what is the next button to do? It isn't adjusting the photo so what is the purpose of this section?
in advance.
Jacque

When you fill in those boxes you are constraining the crop tool to the dimensions that you set. In your post you mentioned 8X10, so if you plug those numbers in the width and height boxes, you crop will come out sized in an 8X10 aspect ratio. If you don't enter any numbers in those boxes, essentially your crop will be free form and will end up whatever size you make it. Using the dimension boxes will allow you to set your aspect ratio to whatever size you decide to print and your picture will fit without any distortion. You still have to drag across your picture as you normally would, just filling in the numbers is not going to automatically crop your picture. You still have full control over that within the dimensions chosen.

As far as the resolution box is concerned, it is best to leave that blank. That way your crop will get all the pixels you select and not be adding or subtracting from them. Leaving that box blank in most instances you will end up with a higher ppi count than you may have set manually, and that is not a bad thing.

How do you drag a photo? If I crop the photo, fill in the sizes at the top but leave the resolution box blank then drag the photo to fit? then thats all I need to do? Then copy it to a dvd and take to the printer?

Do I have to go to the menu where is has "Image" and change the image size there? Because when I go there it still has a 72PPI even after I type in the 8x10 size at the top. I'm worried that if I don't change that to at least 300 the resolution will be off.

Thanks-
Jacque

OK....once you have selected the crop tool and set the picture width and height, in order to crop you need to click on the picture and while holding the mouse button down, move it across the picture to select the area you want to keep. You will see a box forming as you do this. The area inside the box will be your crop selection area. The act of holding down the mouse button while moving the mouse across the screen is called "dragging".

As a rule of thumb, when I am cropping, I generally start in the upper left of the picture at the farthest point I want to include in the crop, then drag down and to the right until I have the area selected I want to keep. If I am not exactly on the area I want, if you have released the mouse button you can grab the crop box you just created at one of the corners and holding down the mouse button, resize the box. If you just want to move the entire crop selection area, you can either click and hold you mouse button inside the box and move it around, or you can use your arrow keys and move it by hitting them.

Once you are satisfied with what you have selected, simply hit your Enter or Return button and the area outside the box will disappear, leaving you with your selected area.

Hope this helps.....and please don't think I'm talking down to you. I do tech support and talk to engineers much smarter than me all the time and end up having to simplify everything for them!

Gene, if she does not fill in the dpi box to 300 and leaves it blank, will it not stay at 72dpi. I was understanding that you need to have 300dpi for print.

If the Resolution box is left blank, Photoshop will use whatever pixels are there and spread them around. I just tried it on one of my shots and wound up with a 4x6 at 167 ppi.

Filling in a number (300 or whatever) tells Photoshop to resample the image (up or down) to 300.

If I am printing a picture, I always crop to 300ppi - even if it would be way above the 300 ppi range.

My reasoning for this is that I read somewhere that letting Photoshop resample and resize the image is in almost every case better than leaving it to the printer driver to figure out what to do with pixels it cant handle.

Gene, if she does not fill in the dpi box to 300 and leaves it blank, will it not stay at 72dpi. I was understanding that you need to have 300dpi for print.

I did a quick check just to verify my numbers and here is what happened when I exported a photo from LR2 to CS3 at 300 ppi and then cropping it. My image in LR2 shows it is 3008x2000 pixels in dimension in the Library. Upon export to CS3, it shows it to be 300 ppi and approximately 10" x 6.6" image size. So I cropped it to 6x4 per my instructions above and ended up with a 6x4 image at approximately 372 ppi, according to the Image Size box. That was cropping it down to 2233 pixels by 1489 pixels, which was cropping out nearly 25% of the original photo. As far as I know, cropping does not do any resampling of the image, just takes the pixels you select and makes an image of that size. If I crop out about 10% of the photo, I end up with over 400 ppi. This leaves me with more than enough pixels for a good print of my image, and I still have enough pixels for a much larger print if I choose to do that. My theory here is that when I am cropping to get the best composition, I do not want to throw away any pixels if I don't have to. You can't get them back once their gone, and if you have PSE/CS resize and resample, they are making highly intelligent guesses at what is missing. Usually this works out OK within limits, but stretch those limits too much and you will start seeing a degraded image.

I also reset that same image to 72 ppi without resampling. That blew it up to an approximately 41x27 inch image (from the original 10x6 at 300ppi). If I tried printing it at that ppi, the image would look terrible, but it would be big enough to be seen from across a large room. I cropped that to a 6x4 and ended up with a 2309 pixel x 1539 pixel image that at 6x4 would still be over 384 ppi. Again, more than enough data for a good print.

And I probably should have made a distinction between cropping for composition vs cropping for printing. I know there has been a lot of talk about what is best for printing vs display, etc. As for printing the above cropped image, I have printed using both an HP photosmart 7150 (old, old, printer) and on my newer Epson Stylus Photo 1400 and both printers can handle a photo of that dimension with no problems. In other words, for my own personal printing here at home, I don't reset my ppi, just let the program and printer manage that. Some printers have size and dimension requirements so if you are dealing with one that does, you certainly will need to abide by those requirements. Is this a hard and fast rule? No. Some can print like this and get perfectly acceptable results. Others may have trouble with it. It all depends on your equipment and its requirements. That is what should dictate how you handle your printing. Just remember also, though, that PPI on the computer and DPI (dots per inch, which is how your printer sees things) are two different things.

As you can see from what I have done above, setting that box to 300 ppi would be throwing away pixels. There does come a point, though, where depending on how much you are cropping, that you can end up with less than 300 ppi. I did another crop of that same image down to 1518 pixels by 1012 pixels and ended up with 253 ppi. I could still get a decent print out of that, but I have not selected enough of the original pixels to maintain 300 ppi. That crop left me with 49% of the original picture, a pretty severe crop.

I guess the bottom line, for me anyway, is not to throw away anything I might need later, and if you are resizing for a specific requirement, save it as a new file and DO NOT overwrite your original. You may need it later with all its pixels intact!

Now that I've confused the matter even more......

But, for the printing side of it, when in the Print dialog, if you go to "Print Size" and choose "Custom Size" and then on the Scaled Print Size controls you check the "Scale to Fit Media" box, you'll get the revised PPI for whatever size of paper you're using. In most cases the 72ppi (which is inadequate for printing) will shoot up to over 300ppi. If you can't get that figure up any higher than about 150ppi then it's because the image has been resized and resampled at the lowest resolution and your print quality will suffer.

It's a long ongoing debate, but when you open a jpeg from your camera in PSE it will show as 72dpi. But that's not fixed - it's a very temporary thing. Your picture could be as much as 60 inches wide at 72dpi, but if you resize without resampling it will change the resolution - you won't see a difference on screen but if you reduce that 60" image to 15" wide then you improve the quality by a factor of 4 - it will become 288ppi and be fine for general printing at the A4 or Letter size and also enough to give decent resolution at A3 size.

If I had a 20Mp camera and opened up a jpeg straight from camera in PSE then the image would be around 100 inches wide, but it's still being displayed at 72dpi. Now if I reduced the size to 20", as in the example above, without resampling, I'd have increased resolution five times, and 5 x 72 = 360ppi. That's plenty of quality for an A3 sized print and even approaching A2. Not too many people have A3 printers at home and almost none have A2 printers.

The moral is - don't alter (resample) resolution, whether it's called dpi or ppi, unless your end target is never going to get printed - and who knows...... your image on the gallery here could one day require printing at decent quality.

[edit] Gene, you posted while I was writing - and we seem to be in complete agreement! [edit]

Good explanations Gene and Geoff!
What is important to keep in mind (and simple to understand) is that as long as you don't resample (compress or expand your pixels), you keep all the original qualities of your pictures and printers are smart enough to handle resolutions over 300 dpi. If there is too much, they will print at their best resolution, if there is not enough, that's not their fault. Keep all your useful pixels unchanged.
Photoshop and Elements have a crop tool that enables cropping and resampling in the same dialog. If you understand what you are doing, this makes cropping and resampling quicker but that is highly misleading.
As indicated, not checking the resample box lets you see if you get a correct resolution.
You may want to use this feature of resampling if you are preparing different pictures for a montage, to control the size of each item with the same resolution. I have done this manually, but I am curious to know if those of you who are experts in montage use this feature. I suspect this enables importing different items with just the right size and resolution to avoid useless huge PSD sizes or insufficient resolution for some items?

I had to run,Gene's test. I opened an image in editor. It was 48 x 32 at 72ppi. I then cropped it to an 8 x 10 and then checked the ppi. It was 260. I had no idea that cropping without a setting in that box would increase the ppi. Learn something new everyday, thanks guys.