When you’re preparing your artwork for giclée printing, you need to understand proportions and scaling to ensure your prints will appear exactly as you envision them once printed. Whether you’re an artist selling your limited edition prints, a photographer who wants to reproduce high-quality images, or simply someone who wants to create custom prints, scaling your prints properly will help to maintain composition, avoid unwanted cropping, and ensure your prints fit standard frame sizes.
In Part I of this series, we’ll cover how image proportions work, and how to scale prints without distortion or cropping.
What Are Image Proportions?
The proportion of an image describes the mathematical relationship between its width and height. To determine the proportion, you divide the width and height by the largest number that will go evenly into both. For example:
- A 12″ x 18″ print has a 2:3 proportion (divide each by 6).
- A 16″ x 20″ print has a 4:5 proportion (divide each by 4).
Common Proportions for Art & Photography
| Proportion | Common Print Sizes |
| 2:3 | 12″ x 18″, 16″ x 24″, 20″ x 30″ |
| 3:4 | 9″ x 12″, 12″ x 16″, 18″ x 24″ |
| 4:5 | 8″ x 10″, 16″ x 20″, 24″ x 30″ |
| 1:1 (Square) | 12″ x 12″, 16″ x 16″, 24″ x 24″ |
Using Proportions to Scale Your Images
When scaling an image for different print sizes, it’s important to maintain its original proportion to avoid stretching, distortion, or unwanted cropping of your image.
To scale an image so it will not be distorted or cropped, you simply apply a multiplier to the proportion of the image. For example, an image with a proportion of 2:3 could be printed as a 4×6 (multiplier of 2), 6×9 (multiplier of 3), 8×12 (multiplier of 4), etc. Though whole numbers are easier to work with, you can use fractions as a multiplier as well. An image with a proportion of 2:3 when multiplied by 2 ½ would scale to 5 x 7.5.
If this is all starting to sound like your middle school math class, you’re not wrong! So how about a good old-fashioned story problem to illustrate:
Janice painted a 24×36 original and now would like to make prints in a variety of sizes, smaller and larger, to sell at her art shows. What sizes can she print to avoid cropping or distorting her image.
Janice’s original has a proportion of 2:3. After doing some math she decided to make prints in the following sizes: 8×12,16×24, and 30×45.
Cropping and distortion
What are your options if you want to print your image at a size that is not the same proportion as the original? Let’s continue our story about Janice:
Janice really wants to offer a print that will fit in an 8×10 standard frame. What are her options?
There are three ways that Janice can proceed:
- Janice could distort her image so that it will fit (squeeze the 8×12 to 8×10). Though this is easy to do with a digital image, it is almost never a good idea since this would alter the composition.
- Janice could crop the original to fit. Since the natural size would be 8×12, she’d have to cut out the equivalent of 2 inches from the height. This can be an acceptable option if the original composition permits cropping without losing essential elements.
- Janice could make a smaller print that matches the proportions of her original on an 8×10 piece of paper. A 6×9 print on an 8×10 piece of paper would work. Similarly, she could make 8×12 prints on 11×14 paper.
Using our print size calculator
If all this math talk has you fidgeting like a bored middle school kid, the print size calculator on our website can do the calculations for you. It’s a simple three step tool:
- Enter the original dimensions in inches or pixels
- Enter a new desired dimension for either the width or the height
- Press calculate to determine the remaining dimension. This will give you sizes that can be printed without cropping.
Here’s an example:
Understanding Image Proportions for Your Printing Options
Once you know the image proportions of your original or digital file, you can calculate the sizes it can be printed without cropping or distorting your image. But there is one more critical factor in determining how large a print you can make. We’ll discuss image resolution in Scaling Your Images for Giclee Printing, Part II: Understanding Image Resolution.