The Tricks To Borderless Printing Inside Lightroom & More

Hi and welcome to my blog.  Today I want to share the tricks to printing borderless images inside Lightroom. This trick is great not only for printing in studio or at home, but also great for preparing your files for print at a professional lab or places like Walgreens, CVS, Costco, Walmart, ect.  The problem with making prints in various sizes is the size of your sensor.  The sensor is not the same aspect ratio as many standard prints.  For example, a camera with a full frame sensor, like the 5D, 5D MkII, and the 5D MkIII all have a 3:2 ratio.  A 3:2 ratio simply means the long side is 1.5 times as long as the short side.  This is why a 4×6 print is very popular, it needs no cropping, it just fits.

If you’re like me, you might also like to compose and crop your images in the viewfinder. Just remember doing this can cause a huge problems when it’s time to make a print.  Most all print sizes have aspect ratios that are different.  This means using standard sizes can cause you to lose information in the final print due to cropping.  An alternative to cropping is to live with a funky border, not really an option for me. Remember if you shrink the images to fit, the border will not be the same on each edge of the print and your print and will look kind of bad, but it will fit and lead to all sorts of band aid solutions during framing.

Avoid the problem, altogether, by thinking about the print sizes you plan to make, when you are shooting.  This can save you a bunch of headaches later on.  If you plan to print a bunch of 8×10′s you need to be sure to not crop so tightly in camera.  By doing so, you will have plenty of room to work with the files in post.  Most importantly you will be able to retain all of the information from the scene and translate it to the final print.

Lets look at print sizes in 5×7 (3.5:2.5 ratio) and 8×10 (5:4 ratio).  Those ratios are much different than the 4×6 (3:2). The 5×7 has a long side that is 1.4 times as long as the short side and 8×10 prints have a long side that is 1.25 times as long as the short side.  It’s confusing, isn’t it?  Wel,l I have some solutions for you.  If you plan to print non standard ratio sizes, do not crop as tightly in camera.  Better yet, I will show you how to easily fix the problem in Lightroom. Watch my video to see the tricks I use on dealing with the funky borders caused if you when you choose to make print or save files that do not have the same ratio as your cameras sensor.  Lightroom makes it easy to resize to any ratio, without knowing any of this, “Ratio Information”.

Please remember this video is not intended to be definitive, I am not claiming this video is the ONLY way or even the BEST way to understand Borderless Printing Inside Lightroom. I am merely offering my thoughts on Borderless Printing Inside Lightroom and offered this video only because it might be helpful to someone.  Thanks for taking time to visit my blog and if you find this post useful, please tweet @ThomasShue with a link to this post.  Help spread the word about my blog, I offer these posts for free in the hopes that I can help someone. I hope you have a great day, Thomas Shue