Hey Judy...I'm not too savvy about photo editing. I use a little free program myself. First I'm totally unfamiliar with PP7.... the program you are using. I need to ask you a few questions tho'....if you don't mind. First, what kind of camera are you using? How many megapixels is your camera..2, 3, 5,...more? If your using a digital camera and you don't have enough megapixels you may not be able to get a photo the size of a 5x7 or an 8x10 and if you do get those dimensions they may not be of really good quality. Let me know...and hopefully a really smart person is reading this and can really help....Kathy

catlady15,

Question for you. After typing in 8" height and 10" width, you say it reduces the photo in size? After it reduces in size, see if you are looking at the resampling at 100% or actual size.

Eric

Well, here goes. The aspect ratio of your digital camera output probably does not lend itself to a simple resizing.

If they have a crop tool now where you can set the parameters, you can try that. I'm assuming you want high quality for printed output because photos that large are not suitable for the web.

Here is how I did it in my older version of PSP. It is unconventional but works and takes some trial and error.

A 5X7 should be 1500 X 2100 pixels; and 8X10, 3000 X 2400 pixels unless your camera is smaller than 4mp and set the length and width according to how the original is oriented, portrait or landscape.

Open your original and always make a duplicate and close the original. That way you won't accidentally overwrite your original which should always be kept intact in a separate folder. Create a new blank image with the dimensions above, I use white for the background color but it doesn't matter, 300 dpi (72 dpi for the web); if it won't handle that, try 250 dpi.

Use the percent method of resampling, check the box that says maintain aspect ratio, probably use bicubic or smart size or whatever they have now that gives the best quality. If the lines look jaggy, don't worry, at full size they should smoothe out.

Use 90%, 85%, etc., until you get it to a size where it looks like it might fit the new image. Select all, select copy, make the new image active by left-clicking on the top bar of the blank image, paste into that, move until you get it framed the way you want it. You will probably lose some of the border depending on how precise you select the percentage, and you don't want to make it so small that it doesn't fill the entire new image leaving any background showing. Then save it to a different folder as a jpg, make sure you don't have any compression set, you want 100%.

There might be other ways of doing it with your version; I quit upgrading at 5, but still use it quite a bit although I prefer Photoshop now because they have a crop tool where you can be precise, it does all the math for you for any size picture you want within the limitations of your original.

Before you do anything, be sure to learn and use the rotate tool because many photos are off horizontally by up to 2 degrees and more, and it is distracting to look at a photo like that and indicates carelessness except in rare cases it is deliberate for effect. On closeups it's not such an issue, but with most else, it certainly can be. You can probably figure out that yourself by playing around with it, but it takes a little thinking and practice. Most of my photos, if I don't shoot them perfectly, are off in the range 1 to 1.5 degrees, clockwise or counterclockwise. I use increments of .5, .25, .75, 1.5, 1.25, once 4, etc., trial and error, until I get everthing lined up right.

There's probably a more sophistacated way of doing that; I never learned how. Sometimes displaying the grid helps to check the accuracy of your work, then I turn the grid off again. I like red for the grid color.