Now what happens if we want to print out our portrait image on a 4in x 6in photo paper? We know we can rotate the image 90 degrees to get it to fit better. Now the ratios are almost exactly the same. If you were to print it out, you would probably just let the printer crop off the edges for you, or you may even crop the image in your image editor and resize.
But what happens when you want to display it on a TV? We have 4 options. After each option below is performed on the image, the image is resized to fit the TV. Right now we assume that our photo has plenty of information (pixels) to fill the TV.
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1) |
Rotate and crop image |
| 2) | Resize - stretch / shrink the image to fit your page without maintain the image's aspect ratio. |
| 3) | Crop your image. |
| 4) | Add a matte around your image. Some call this "shrink to fit" |
Below is a visual example of each. Keep in mind the ratios for the images. TV is 4:3 = 1.333 and our portrait image is 1168:1760 = 0.664. Note that we are not worrying about any DV type pixel aspect ratio right now. We are just assuming that our TV pixels are square.
So lets take a look at each option and how it affects the image. It looks like rotate and resize are just not usable at all. Rotating will work OK if you are printing a photo, but displaying it on a TV will cause a lot of hurt necks from rotated heads. The resize just plain ignores the content of the image. You see this on web pages where the image is resized, but to a different width height ratio than the original image. The crop looks good, and can be made to look even better if you pan the image up or down over time. The matte looks pretty good also. Because you can do so much with the added dimension of time, video opens up all kinds of options. You could start with an image that is cropped then zoomed out and panned until the entire image is revealed matted. Or you could start with the entire image matted, the pan and zoom to a specific person in the image to reveal their smile.