Hybrid Projects

When I was working on my hybrid project of a tissue box cover, I realized a couple of things. If you want a digital file to print out at a specific size, you must trick your printer into doing that for you. The average photo printer will take a file and either shrink or stretch it to make it fit into a standard size output. It might also cut off part of the photo if it is too wide or too tall once it has been stretched or shrunk to size.

Even if you have set your printer not to cut off bits of the photo, it will usually do the stretching or shrinking part, to give you the 'best' photo it can. Just setting my printer to produce photos with a white border around the edge will not do what I want. The printer will still shrink or stretch my files so the edges are all exactly the same.

In order to trick my printer into giving me the correct sized graphic, I create a new document that is a standard photo size, such as 5" x 7". Then I put my odd sized graphic into the new document. When I save it as a new .jpg file, there will be a white border filling in to make the whole image 5" x 7". I just have to trim the white part off after I print it to get a graphic the size that I need for my hybrid project.

The other thing is that Photoshop keeps the parts of the layers that you don't see. If I am working with an graphic that is 4.5" x 6.7" and I drag a 12" x 12" piece of paper into that graphic, that paper layer is still 12" x 12". I can't see it, but the extra paper is there. If I cut a 4.5" x 6.7" piece out of the 12" x 12" paper and use that, I don't have extra paper that I can't see. If I let a ribbon hang over the edge, that ribbon will still be there, too. If I don't crop when I'm done with all of my editing, that extra stuff will stay in my image where I can't see it. I've got to merge all my layers and crop the graphic down to the size that I want. (The other option is to crop each layer. That's way too much work.)

In summary, crop your merged or flattened graphic in Photoshop to be exactly the size that you want it to be. Then save your cropped graphic into a new standard photo sized document to create a graphic on a white background. When you print, you'll get a standard sized photo that you can cut with a scissors or paper trimmer to be the size that you want for your hybrid project.