How to Print 8x10 Photos

Digital photography opens up so many avenues for sharing or displaying our images with audiences locally or anywhere. One classic method for sharing images with others is to print 8x10 photos.

When you print 8x10 photos, you can send them cheaply through the mail, put them in a simple low profile frame, matte them and use a larger, more ornate frame, enclose them in a photo album, or put them in a portfolio with other print 8x10 photos.

When you print 8x10 photos through a high-quality printing company such as Printique, Adorama’s premium printing service, you have all of those options available, plus a whole lot of other choices you can make for customizing how you print 8x10 photos.

Why We Print 8x10 Photos as that Size

Have you ever looked at your digital images and wondered why you have to crop so much to print 8x10 photos from the image you see? The simple answer is that it’s all about aspect ratios and inertia.

When speaking photographically, the aspect ratio is the proportion of the long side of the image to the short side. The aspect ratio of a Full Frame or APS-C format image is 3:2, which explains why a 4x6 inch print was delivered when we all shot 35mm film. Micro 4/3rds (MFT) format has an aspect ratio of 4:3 that’s more video-friendly.

And yet, even in the several decades when a huge portion of images were captured on 35mm film, we would print 8x10 photos. This is where inertia comes in. Before the 135 format (Full Frame 35mm film), some standard image sizes were already 4x5 inches and 8x10 inches.

Those old cameras that used metal or glass plates had to produce large images because enlargements were difficult to produce. The 5:4 aspect ratio has been a part of photography since before celluloid film was common. It’s a pretty comfortable viewing experience, too, so we print 8x10 photos now, even though we have multiple options as digital photographers.

Of course, there were and are other print sizes like 3 ½ x 5 ¼, 5 x 7, and 11 x 14, which don’t quite fit the aspect ratios of either our current digital formats or the standard 35mm film format. Somewhere in time, these photo sizes came about due to the sizes of the cameras and the negatives they produced being in popular use.

Choices When We Print 8x10 Photos

When we print 8x10 photos, we have more options than the size alone. Some options may be determined by our shooting choices, such as having a vertical (portrait) or a horizontal (landscape) orientation.

Opting for a good printing company, we also have options of the luster or sheen of the surface of the physical prints. Just as with the paint on our walls, the sheen affects how they are perceived by viewers.

A glossy or semi-gloss print has a highly reflective surface and is a great choice for images with bold colors and contrasts or interesting and arresting subject composition. Actors and other performers would hand out “slicks” of their headshots to talent seekers; these were usually glossy finish print 8x10 photos

A matte finish printed photo has a lower sheen, and the surface of it may have a slight texture that you can just barely see or feel. These are less reflective and are a great choice when we hang our enlargements up on a wall since they can be seen without glare from different positions within a room.

Cropping Guides to Print 8x10 Photos

As we upload our image files to the printing company, we will likely have an option to vary the cropping needed by a little bit. I find it’s better to have an image file that I’ve already cropped myself with an image editing or post-processing program.

The various post-processing programs all have this tool or capability, though it may be labeled differently from each other. It’ll be in the basic tools somewhere, easy to access.

In ACDSee Photo Studio, you find cropping on the Edit page (as opposed to Develop), and to get an 8x10, you click the 8x10 box under the menu for copping and also click the box for “constrain proportions” to set the cropping tool.

In Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, you would open the Quick Develop panel, open the drop-down menu for crop ratio, and then choose the ratio or the print size, they are all listed. Other programs will have these same options labeled in an easy-to-understand way. If you can’t find your cropping tool, all major programs have online support and many have user communities to check.

Larger or Smaller than 8x10

While you will want to be able to print 8x10 photos, you will also see many options when you’re cropping for yourself in your program and when you upload image files to a printing company.

Some of the other sizes are what we mentioned above, 3 ½ x 5 ¼, 4x6, 5x7, and 11x14. To take advantage of the full image area of the 35mm format, many printers offer prints in sizes such as 8x12, and 11x17. Panoramic or square formats are available, too, 10x10, 6x18, and 12x36 are common.

You could combine three large square prints into a side-by-side display for a separated style of panorama, or combine photo squares into a larger composite square or rectangular display. Photo collages or a wall collage of separately printed images put together images of different sizes and shapes into an eye-catching display.

Printique - Adorama’s Premium Photo Printing Company

Adorama’s premium photo printing company Printique is a one-stop solution for most - if not all - of these physical printing options. There are so many ways to print 8x10 photos and other sizes when you use a premium photo printer like Printique.

You can decide on standard size photo prints, poster-size prints up to 40x60 inches (that’s 3 ½ by 5 feet!), and different mediums such as matte or glossy papers, acrylic prints, metal prints, and canvas wraps, plus various other specialty processes.

Whether you print 8x10 photos, other sizes, or any special process or design, it’s your art, create the physical display that you want so that you can show and share your images.