Aspect ratio defines how sides of a rectangle relate to each other. For example, 1920x1280, 3456x2304 and 5184x3456 photos all have an aspect ratio of 3:2, while 3072x2304 or 2272x1704 resolutions correspond to an aspect ratio of 4:3. The bulk of digital cameras today are either 3:2 or 4:3. The problem begins when you want to print photos.
Typical photo print sizes are 4x6, 5x7, 8x10, 8x12, 11x14 and some others. Among them, only few match the aspect ratio of digital cameras. Particularly, 6x8 photos have an aspect ratio of 4:3 and 8x12 corresponds to an aspect ratio of 3:2. Whenever you need printing a different size photo, you have a problem. Unequal aspect ratios will force you to crop images to make them fit.
Let’s say you want to make an 8x10 print of a photo taken with your 3:2 DSLR camera. As we have seen earlier, the aspect ratio of 3:2 matches an 8x12 print. Which means you have to crop 2 inches of the picture!
Is it possible to adjust aspect ratio without cropping a photo?
Whenever you have to crop a photo, you lose information. Sometimes it’s just a background, sometimes the details are truly important. Often, cropping a picture also leads to broken composition of a photo due to lack of room on the cropped version.
Being a content aware resizing tool, iResizer offers a more intelligent approach to the problem. Using a gentle "folding" of the image, it changes its size and preserves all crucial elements of the composition. Here is how it works.
First of all, you should decide which parts of the picture you want to protect from resizing, cropping and distortion. Usually, these are central or distinctive elements on the photo - persons, animals, buildings and so on. The green marker serves these needs. Simply select all areas on the photo you want to preserve with the green marker. Similarly, the red marker denotes areas you’d prefer to not see on your cropped image, that is, red selects zones you are ready to sacrifice.
Now you are ready for cropless changing of the aspect ratio of the photo. Run the resizing process and select the desired aspect ratio in the dialog. iResizer analyzes the image and finds ways to apply the selected aspect ratio with minimum damage done to the protected green zones.
