I just purchased the Sony DSC-F707 and took some images that I wanted to have printed to the local photo shop here.

Not knowing anything about the process, I was told to "just copy them to a cd and bring them in"

To make a long story short, most were horribly off center with cut-off heads and such.

The guy proceeds to (very vaguely) tell me that I have to resize them to 4x6. I assumed that I could snap the photo and since it was a high megapixel camera (5 megapixel to be exact) I wouldn't have any problem getting the size I need. Turns out, it doesn't have anything to do with it...

I get home and open the pictures in Microsoft Picture IT and in Adobe Photoshop 6 and neither will allow me to resize them. Picture it resizes them but adds a portion of plain white background to fill in and make it fit to 4x6. Which I don't understand.

And in my opinion the user interface in Photoshop requires a PHD. I was able to resize a few in Photoshop that were taken in the 3/2 setting my camera has, but they resized to 6x4.5 and if I take these to the printer, I'm afraid I'll be in the same boat.

Other size photos taken with the camera, all the way up to the highest setting will not resize anywhere close to the correct size for a 4x6.

Suggestions?

To resize a picture in Photoshop:

File/Menu/Edit etc...your menu up there....

Image/Image Size (not canvas size), and specify a new image size, like 640 by 480 or some such.

Tried that.

Makes the picture equate to .12 inches wide and .09 inches tall....

Pic another setting, then. Although 640x480 should be about 10 by 6 inches.

Here is what you do:

1. Load your pic into photoshop.
2. Goto Image/Image Size from the "Print Size" section make sure both of the pull-down boxes in the "height" and "width" sections say "inches". Enter in desired dimensions.

You may run into problems if you "constrain proportions" is checked and the pic won't scale down to 4x6.

The more involved way to do it is:

1. Load your pic
2. Click on the "rectangular marquee tool" (dotted line box). Use this to draw a box around what you want in your pic. Hit ctrl-c
3. Click on File/New and when the box comes up change the dimensions to 4x6. Hit ctrl-v.

Hell I don't know what the hell I am doing half the time with Photoshop.

Nice that the photo guy was so helpful.  It would be benificial to know what the print settings are.  Such is customer service these days.
Imbroglio has it right.  Print size has not so much to do with pixels as size and DPI (dots per inch).  Pixels are for display on the screen.
I'd stick with keeping the "constrain proportions" setting otherwise you may squish/stretch your picture.  Using resampling will maintain DPI while changing the size of your image.  If you're making the image smaller, disabling resampling will increase the DPI which is most likely neither here nor there.  Problems come up more often when increasing image size or DPI as there's a finite amount of data, again, probably not here nor there.
You're on the right track with you're resizing.  The problem you're running into with the extra 1/2" is that a 4x6 image is not 3:2.  4.5x6 = a 3:2 ratio in the computer world of square pixels.  If getting all of the image printed (at least from what little info the guy at the shop gave you) you could adjust the image height to 4" which would give you a width of 5.3333332 or something like that and end up with some dead space on each side of the print.  If you want it at exactly 4x6 without squishing the picture you'll have to crop .5" off the picture, or you could copy/paste into a new image as Imbroglio recommended.  You'll just have to make sure you flatten your layers and save in a usable format.  You can turn on/off and change the display of the image rulers in the preferences menu under file.
Hope this helps!

Contact [email protected] and ask her your question.  Tell her I referred you and she will be glad to help.  

I think the problem here is that the resolution (Dots Per Inch) remains very high, so the picture is tiny at 640x480 pixels.  Try changing your resolution first (on the "Resize Image" screen) to something reasonable for photo printing, like 300 dpi.  Then change the size to 4"x6".

Not to repeat what's already been said but what really matters in a digital format print is pixel dimensions. An 8x10 at 300ppi is actually 2400 x 3000 pixels.

Photoshop can be daunting and teaching you all it can do is more than this board could handle BUT adjusting image/file sizes in Photoshop is a relatively easy matter -- Image-->Image size. You can adjust real pixel dimensions there and adjust ppi as well.

To get output from a digital file in a size that you want, you need to know what pixel dimensions the output device requires.

Aspect ratios are a separate issue. For example, relating back to the worlf of film, you can't get an 8x10 print from a 35mm negative because the aspect ratio is way to different. You have two choices:
1 -- crop the image to conform to the print
2 -- print the entire image but have a border that's wider on one aspect.
That's not a strictly digital issue, that's a source to print issue.

If your local printer is less than helpful, you might try an online digital printer like [url]www.printroom.com[/url].

And in case you're wondering, I do kinda, sorta know what I'm talking about here -- [url=www.pyphoto.com]website[/url]

I read in the paper yesterday about an Adobe website that does this automatically for you.
Sorry, I didn't write down the URL.

Okay, first off you need to check what settings you have the camera at.  For maximum versatility, you need to set it for the highest resolution and set it to take JPEG photos.  You should be able to fit 51 max-res .jpg's on a 128 MB Memory Stick.
Next, load the photos into your computer via the USB reader, then save them as .jpg's and open them via Photoshop.
Go into Image, then Image Size, hit constrain proportions and then change the size to whatever you want.
That should be it.
I don't know if it will help with the photos you have already taken, but it should work fine for any future ones.
If you want and you can, email me the photo files and I can try to get them to the right size for you using Photoshop...I do a lot of digital photography as a hobby.
Hope this helped.

And make sure it’s 640 [b]pixels[/b] by 480 [b]pixels[/b], and not inches, or Photoshop will take about two days to resize it.  Learned that one the hard way.

Thanks for the help guys. I was resizing them using the "image resize" feature in photoshop...but was concerned because they were going to 4.5x6 instead of an exact 4x6.

How do you trim the extra .5 off the height and have it be exact? Are there measurements somewhere when doing a crop that allow you to see what you are taking off?

Go into the File/Preferences/Units & Rulers menu and be sure "Inches" is selected as the unit of measure.  Then go to the "View" menu and select "View Rulers".  This should create a border around your image that shows dimensions in inches.  For accurate work make sure your Info window is shown by going to the "Window" menu and selecting "View Info" (Navigator and I believe Options are in the same window).  The Info window will give you cursor position and selected dimensions.
Use the selection tool w/ Image/Crop or use the crop tool (accessible from the selection tool button) to crop.