Print Size Woes AGAIN

[jordankreationz]

Well I finally printed some of my prints today at walmart. (my wireless acct is broken for now...and can't upload to mpix)
I had sized them "right" for the sizes they needed to be. Then the machine broke and I had to have my tech friend behind the counter put them in from there.The result?
The ones sized for wallet didn't print right but the ones that supposedly shouldn't have printed right as wallets...ie the 5x7's, printed accurate wallets. :?
I've read up on this forum what sizes should work and I tried and now I'm more confused than ever.
So here's a couple of direct questions.

#1. If you are building a collage what exact dimensions do you plug into photoshop to start out with? If you know you will want wallets does it change any?

#2. I thought I understood that an 8x10 will print wallets. This didn't happen for me today. Any thoughts on why?? Any thoughts on why a 5x7 printed a perfect wallet?

#3. What exact size do you crop wallets to?

I think I pretty much understand how to gauge for future reference as far as in camera accounting for cropping...2 off the long and 1 off the short.

Anyway that's all my rambling for now. PULEEZE help me.

Thanks
DJ

[LoungeLizard]

If you're going to be cropping to a specific size (and you're using PS), learn how to use the crop tool bar. There are places up there for you to put the dimensions you want and the crop will be limited to that dimension. You should also make sure to specify the 300dpi at the same time.

[bburton]

Speculating here...maybe "Wallet Size" is a variable with differing dimensions; maybe 4x5 is not a universal size. Maybe Walmart's "wallets" (hard to say!) are 2.5x3.5 or less (maintaining the aspect ratio)--in which case a 5x7 (same aspect ratio) would still shrink proportionately, but an 8x10 would not.

So, what are the dimensions of the Walmart wallet? Use that ratio to crop your original files.

[Bill Huber]

DJ, I feel for you, I fight that all the time getting the print to just the size I want.
What I have done now is do all my printing with another program. It is a little cheap program called PixPrint 3. The output is very very good.

http://www.gosunshine.com/pixprint.html

You can set the Auto Size you want and then drag the image and drop it and it does everything for you.
You can not set an Auto Size and it will let you scale it to what ever size you want.

Here are 3 quick screen shots.
First one is free style, you size it to what you want.
Scond is Auto Size to 4x6
The last is a custom 2.25x3.25

[pippin]

since i work on a frontier also, i can tell you right now, that an 8x10 in photoshop doesn't render correctly with frontier software ;)

its a pain, believe me.

MANY people edit their pics to a 4x6 or something in photoshop, bring it into our store, and are shocked that there are parts that are missing.

its a pita, we can do it, it just takes a little while.

oh, and wallets on a fronteir are generally printed 8-up on 7x10 inch paper thereabouts ;)

[jordankreationz]

Originally Posted by lduskis

since i work on a frontier also, i can tell you right now, that an 8x10 in photoshop doesn't render correctly with frontier software ;)

its a pain, believe me.

MANY people edit their pics to a 4x6 or something in photoshop, bring it into our store, and are shocked that there are parts that are missing.

its a pita, we can do it, it just takes a little while.

oh, and wallets on a fronteir are generally printed 8-up on 7x10 inch paper thereabouts ;)

I guess it's just a trial and error thing for each individual lab. I think I'm going to take the image that I thought would not work as an 8x10 (actual ratio is 8x12) and see if it prints correctly.
I'll tell ya one thing this has definitely been a learning experience. Taking the pictures is the easy part. Printing seems to be the hard part.

Thanks for all the help guys.

DJ