Help! Image Resizing or not?

[serendipity2]

Hi, I am very much into photography now and I am currently sending images to be displayed on Flickr.com. I have noticed that when you click on my photostream that all my photos are different sizes. However, when looking at other peoples pics most of them all have theirs in much the same size and I don't know where i am going wrong. Do I need to resize after cropping because I crop almost every photograph to get the best image from it.
Also, when sending my photos to an online company to be developed, I am finding that when I get them back they seem to have some bits missing where I have done an extreme close up. If I crop close to the top of the head, I find that once developed part of the head is missing! Please help and tell me where I am going wrong. Thank you x

[rojash]

Well, obviously if you crop a picture, you will change its size, and quite likely its aspect ratio as well. You could resize after cropping but this will reduce the quality, and if you have changed the aspect ratio, either you will have to resize only the height OR the width and live with the change in the other dimension, or distort it to recover the original aspect ratio.

As to your second point, which software are you using to do your cropping? Maybe it's not very accurate.

[stevie21]

One the first point, if other people aren't cropping their pictures then obviously they'll all be the same size. Maybe when you're cropping, you can use a standard shape of rectangle every time. One time it'll be 800x600 pixels, another 600x450. If you resize the 600x450 to 800x600 though you'll lose some quality and it might look pixelated.

On the 2nd question, I think the standard "aspect ratio" for digital photos is different from the traditional shape of photographic paper so when you try to fit the image onto the paper, some of the image at the top/bottom doesn't fit.

Either that or there'd be whitespace at either side. Do you get to preview the pictures on this online site?

[serendipity2]

Thanks for that Rojash...I am using Adobe Photoshop CS8.

[serendipity2]

Thanks for your advice Stevie. I normally get my pics done by truprint and I think I only see the images exactly as they are and not how they WILL look. What's puzzling me about the cropping is how a tightly cropped picture comes out way bigger than a normal one when I put it onto Flickr. It doesn't make sense to me...Angie

[stevie21]

I think I sent some digital images off to truprint to be posted to me and I got a warning that there'd be cropping and did I want the site to edit my photos to prevent this. That's where I got the above info from for your 2nd question

Maybe it was another company...

[rojash]

"I am using Adobe Photoshop CS8. " In that case, I can't imagine that the problem is with your software. I suspect that stevie21 is on the right track. It sounds like Truprint are just carelessly recropping your stuff on order to get it to fit on standard aspect ratio paper.

I would consider taking stevie21's advice of padding your cropped pictures with whitespace in order to return them to a standard aspect ratio. I often have to produce images for web sites where the width and height are not under my control. In these cases, if I feel the image looks better with a different aspect ratio, I usually use the whitespace padding method.