How to crop

[cwiddows]

This might sound almost too easy, but for some reason, I am not getting it as easy as I feel it should be. I need to crop an image to 15x10, but it will be mounted in a frame with a passe-partout that shows 13x8.6 (all centimeters BTW). So I'm looking for an easy way to crop to one aspect ration, but to be able to observe the viewable area through another aspect ration. The images are all in varying resolutions, which made my attempt to use a created image and simply blend, sort of a lot of work, as the mask then needs to set per image and per crop. I tried using the Mat&Frame, but that seems to want to resize my image to fit inside the frame / mats.

Can someone explain how I best achieve this, preferably reasonably efficient. I prefer to use PWP, but if you know of a dedicated program that does this, then I'm open for suggestions.

Thanks

Chris

[Bob Walker]

This sounds like a perfect problem to "solve" using a workflow. A crop widget, followed by a sizing widget (to get exact 15x10 ppi), then a mask in a lightness transform that darkens the border to emphasize just the viewable part of the final image.

[jsachs]

Here is another option using the Layout transformation.

Screen Shot.jpg (213.49 KiB) Viewed 5691 times

I set the layout size to 15x10cm and created two panels:

The first panel holds the image and fills the entire layout and is set to scale and crop the image to fit the panel.

The second panel is totally transparent but has a 0.05cm red border around it and is 13 x 8.6cm, centered in the layout.

When you select an image for panel 1, a cropping rectangle is displayed on it with the proportions 15:10 which you can adjust to determine what part of the image will fill the layout. Making sure panel 2 is in front of panel 1, the red border is displayed where the frame opening will be.

For each image you want to process, you just need to select it into panel 1, adjust the cropping, and click Apply.

The version of PWP I am using here may differ slightly from the latest release version. Sorry the image is so small, but the message board has storage limits. Let me know if you want me to email you a larger version or I can email you the saved layout settings file .

[Dieter Mayr]

Chris,

I do such tasks like this:
First I crop to the size visible by the passe-partout, 13 x 8.6 in your case, with a 1 to 2 mm oversize, depending on the size of the image and the quality and tolerances of the frame and passe-partout.
From now on it can go in a workflow:
I resize the image to the printer resolution at the image size, in my case it would be 300 ppi @ 13 x 8.6 cm
Now I add borders to reach the frame size, take care if the opening in the passe-partout is centered or off center!
I have a additional sharpening for print step in my workflows, you may need that or not.
And off to the printer with it!

The benefits from my point of view:
It saves ink, and most important, it gives a white border for savely handeling the print, so no fingerprints will be on the image itself.

If you use some standard frames and passe-partouts, just create a workflow for each of them, make the crop, pass it through the workflow and you are done.

Hope it helps!

[cwiddows]

Thanks everyone for offering such a varied set of approaches. The one I like for my particular situation is Dieter's suggestion. Really easy to get exactly what I was looking for.