How to Make Wallet Size Prints Using the Crop Tool in Adobe Photoshop

I've been printing quite a lot of wallet-size pictures lately and most of them are about my favorite South Korean group Girls Generation. I actually place them alongside my company ID. Well, that's just me. Anyway, what I usually do is put the picture files on a USB drive and bring it to a nearby photo center to have it printed in photo paper. It's not that expensive. 4 wallet-sized prints in a 4R photo paper is just around $.40. The staff does the editing and arranges them for printing.

However, I found out that printing pictures without considering their dimensions (length and width in terms of pixels or inches), pictures would look stretched or it shrinks when printed on photo paper. Another problem is that if the dimensions do not match a wallet-size picture, some of the edges may be cut. I really hated it when the staff at the printing place asks me if it's ok to cut the image so that it will fit in a wallet-size photo paper.

I'm just a beginner when it comes to digital photo editing and my sister gave me an invaluable tip on how to crop portions of a picture into wallet-size partitions. Now, what I see is what I get. Let me show you how to do it in Adobe Photoshop.

The first thing you should do whenever you are editing a picture is to save a backup copy of the image. If you make a mistake and can't undo and if you don't have backup, you're probably screwed. So make sure you have a backup and edit the backup, not the original. Now, once that is done, open your photo in Photoshop. By the way, I'll be using Photoshop CS3 but the tool will/may be similar with other versions.

For the sake of example, let's use the pictures I provided. On the first picture, what I want to do is crop the image so that my Tiffany photo card will become wallet-size and the black background and my arms should be removed. First, click on the Crop tool on the left side. Then, set the width to 2 inches and height to 3 inches which are the dimensions of a wallet-size picture.

Now it will allow you to choose which part of the image you want to crop. It will automatically set it to an aspect ratio of 2:3 so that it will be easy for you to choose and adjust which part of the picture to crop. Check out the second picture I provided. I set it to select the photo card.

After choosing the part of the picture to crop, once you've decided that you're done, double click the selection. It should show you the wallet-size cropped image as shown in my third picture. It should now print as a wallet-size picture. Now you don't have to worry about incorrect aspect ratios, omitted edges and degraded quality when printing wallet-size pictures.

Source:
Aileen Tadeo