Cropping for Print

[Country Lass]

I am somewhat confused about cropping and saving an image - so here goes....  I photograph wildlife, birds and insects in particular.  My aim is to crop my raw file which I am currently doing in unconstrained mode - great all well so far.  When I have done this I am noticing that the pixel size in my image has dropped.  When I have completed my editing and ready for exporting the image as a JPEG to save it - I have learnt from research that to obtain a good quality 10x8 print I need to be saving images at 3550x2550 pixels - ok so when I save the image I also type this number in the export box and also select best quality.  So - because I dont really understand the pixel side of things - can you please advise if it is ok to export at this value when the cropped image pixel size had dropped below this value?  Hope this makes sense!  Very desperate for an answer

[Dan C]

Hi Country Lass,

Welcome to the forums

When cropping an image, you are physically reducing the pixel size of that image to cut down the canvas.

When exporting the image, if you're manually resizing the export to be larger than your canvas size then Affinity will be re-sampling the pixels in your image. Resampling an image is no issue, however if you're enlarging (resampling) an image by a large factor - say your canvas measures 500px x 500px and you export at 6000px x 6000px then this is likely to cause undesirable results with your image.

You can read more on resampling images here (although the article uses Photoshop, the same principles apply) - https://www.wpsitecare.com/how-to-resize-an-image/