How Can I Resize For Printing?

[securespark]

Hi guys.

Continuing my "How Can I...?" series,

I have Win 7 plus Office 2007.

I'm doing my nut trying to resize a photo so I can print it. It's about twice the size of a passport photo.

I've used Paint & MS Photo Manager, but every time I print, the HP printer chooses the photo paper option & they end up the same size as the photo paper in the machine...

Arrrgggh!

Can anyone enlighten me, please?

 

[OwainDIYer]

open Word
Insert Picture from File
Resize the picture by dragging on the corners
print

 

[securespark]

Cheers, Owain.

Works a treat!

What I can't understand is why the resize won't work in other apps.

And also, there's not an option in any software I've seen that gives you the option of sizing in mm or inches, only by pixels or %ages.

 

[jj4091]

And also, there's not an option in any software I've seen that gives you the option of sizing in mm or inches, only by pixels or %ages.

Photoshop does

 

[securespark]

Thanks. Not got PS.

 

[ericmark]

At the photography club we have just been showed the FastStone Photo Resizer does a great job faster than Photoshop and free.

 

[nickjb]

... but every time I print, the HP printer chooses the photo paper option & they end up the same size as the photo paper in the machine...

This sounds like an issue with the printer. Is it set to scale image to fit rather than 1:1 or 100%?

And also, there's not an option in any software I've seen that gives you the option of sizing in mm or inches, only by pixels or %ages.

That's because mm don't really mean anything in picture terms. The size comes from the number of pixels and the number of pixels per inch

 

[jj4091]

Thanks. Not got PS.

Do you want it? Sorry can't work out how to pm you.

 

[Dave54]

Thanks. Not got PS.

The Gimp has options to resize in almost any unit as well as doing most of the other stuff PS will do.
And it's free.

 

[ericmark]

Although Gimp and Photoshop work in a similar way it's not Photoshop that does all the hard bit of resizing it's Bridge that comes with it.

It is in bridge where you select all the images and it is bridge which feeds the images one at a time into Photoshop.

So although Gimp will resize it's a lot of work selecting each photo and resizing it.

FastStone Photo Resizer does the same as bridge in that you can select 100's of photos for resize click convert and return latter no need to manually select each picture.

It is in fact faster than Photoshop however there is a lack of instructions and it did take some finding the way to set options.

When resizing Jpeg you can select max width and height and also Jpeg quality. I will agree with bridge you can do more like resizing from RAW files and with UFraw running with GIMP you can also handle RAW files. However I must say the Photoshop RAW file handler seems miles better than any of the others I tried.

I have also had a problem printing. With the college printer I used you set dots per inch and the picture size and it printed it as set. My home printer did the same but quality was low with banding when using photo paper so I stuck them all on a stick and took them to Asda. Oh what a mess up. Their software took the shortest side and made it fit paper and cropped the long side instead as will any other printer which would leave white where no picture existed.

My home printer has a single tick box for auto size and if ticked it will always fit the paper what ever size the picture was. The college printer has a to fit function where you can select a whole load of pictures and it will auto arrange the pictures to get maximum on each sheet.

So I would not be surprised to find nothing to do with resizing picture but the printer has a tick box clicked which should not be ticked and it's doing some auto function.

 

[Dave54]

There is a plugin for The Gimp for doing some batch processing, including resizing. It can be found here
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hodsond/dbp.html
There's a link to a Windows version on the page .
I'd agree though that The Gimp isn't Photoshop, and isn't as well integrated with RAW etc. but you can't beat it at the price!
Again as already said another dedicated viewer / processor may be a better option for batch resizing.
Again I'd agree with what's been said about printing. You probably have a box checked somewhere (or not) which is giving the weird results. Printer drivers seem to have a mind of their own when it comes to how the output will look, and "hide" a lot of settings to make it "easier"
There is generally a preview option somewhere though.

 

[empip]

Photoscape 3.6.2
This one looks useful, (noticed pixels and mm/cm being shown in 'print' part of the intro' video.)

Intro' :- http://help.photoscape.org/help.php?id=intro

May well also appeal to children - not used it yet tho'

-0-

 

[BlackSpot]

Use Irfanview (google it) it's free and is great for resizing etc.

 

[securespark]

Thanks guys, long time no visit, but I appreciate your input. I shall try some free software first, see how I go and I'll look at the way the printer is set up, too.

Cheers everyone!

 

[securespark]

Thanks guys, long time no visit, but I appreciate your input. I shall try some free software first, see how I go and I'll look at the way the printer is set up, too.

Cheers everyone!