Need Help Printing Uncropped 4x6s

[JenniferE123]

Hi! I need help! I have made 4x6 ABCs of Me books for both my children, digitally scrapped and exactly sized to 4x6 jpegs for the books requested by grandparents. With the bonus photos, I have 80 layouts made, but they are currently unprintable. Every local and send-away service I have tried (4 so far) either auto crops the pictures so I lose some of the formatting or their paper isn't actually a full 4x6, so I lose some that way. I have photo paper at home that is exactly 4x6, but in spite of 3 months of back and forth with tech support, my HP Photosmart C6180 autocrops no matter what, so I can't print here, either. Does anyone have a printer at home that prints full 4x6 borderless photos WITHOUT cropping them at all? I need to make 6 complete sets, and before I upgrade, I'd love to make sure I get one that works. Thanks so much! Jen

[terilew]

what software are you using to print? I use either photoshop or photoshop elements and haven't had any trouble with it. but my printer is an older model so I don't know if that has anything to do with it or not.

Terri

[Kathleen]

What type of cropping? To get borderless/edge-to-edge printing, the printers need to enlarge the image just a smidge (1/8" - 1/4" horizontally and vertically) to make sure it covers the entire page. Unfortunately, every print is different, so one print could be cropped on the right side, another on the bottom.

My Canon printer, I can choose the amount of extension. If I choose the least amount of extension, I might get the smallest sliver of blank (white) along one edge of the paper, if I choose the most extension, I won't get any white edge, but I will loose noticeable amount of the photo.

Two alternative would be to print on 8 1/2" x 11" photo paper and hand trim the pages. Or, add a border or expand the background so that when the cropping happens, it will be something you don't care about.

[Janet]

I've been THRILLED with the results from scrapbookpictures.com - the prints come back cropped so slightly that I have to really compare to find what a small amount they cut off. The color from them is also right on.

A friend that used to work in the printing industry told me that printers can get that precise, but most aren't that picky and detail oriented. Most images are fine, but digitally scrapped pages seem to require a bit more care.

[JenniferE123]

Hi, Everyone. Thanks for your advice. I'll try expanding the borders and layout size and see if that helps. If not, I'll try printing from scrapbookpictures.com. I've tried printing from PSE and HP print wizards, and I tend to lose about 1/4" from the top and sides, which definitely doesn't work with the layouts I've made. You'd think my HP printer could figure out that a file that is already 4x6 doesn't need to be cropped to fit on a piece of paper that's 4x6. Sigh! Oh, well. I appreciate your help! Have a Happy Thanksgiving! :) Jen

[Lauren]

Its not the perfect solution but you could put 4 of your layouts on a letter size sheet and cut them yourself with a paper cutter - that way you are assured of getting all your layout in..........

[jennilynn10]

Jen - what if you adjust you image size so that it's just a tad smaller than 4x6. I don't know how much you would need - maybe 1/8 inch. So, then you add a white border to make it officially 4x6 again. In photoshop, you could write a script to do this faster for each image. Then when the printer does it's cropping, would you still lose any of your image? Maybe you would just lose part of the white border? Just a suggestion.
Lauren - don't you do something like that with adding a black border when you print your 8x8 pages with ArtsCow?

edit:
This thread explains what I'm trying to say. Good luck Jen!
http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com/forum/showthread.php?t=37104&highlight=artscow