"How To" Guides > Sharing Images
Ready Made Frames - Tips and Suggestions for
Quick, Easy, and Inexpensive Quality Framing
Ready-Made frames provide a convenient and inexpensive do-it-yourself solution to quality framing. Quality discounted frames are readily available online through reputable sources. Some basic considerations are provided in this article that can help the home framer with related decisions.
Basic Framing Choices
Clearly the flexibility in sizes and styles is limitless when you choose to have items custom framed. On the other hand, there is still considerable flexibility in sizes and styles when you purchase ready-made frames from a well stocked and reputable source.
Before ordering prints of a particular size and shopping for a ready-made frame, it is useful to understand how print dimensions and image orientation may impact your project.
Ready-Made Frames
Quality ready-made frames are often used by museums to protect and display items in a museum collection. Styles are often characterized by simple lines that help highlight the image being displayed.
Quality ready-made frames are available to display prints in all of the most popular sizes and styles. Therefore, unless your needs or tastes are relatively unique, it is normally possible to satisfy most framing needs with ready-made frames.
The quickest and simplest solution to home framing is to purchase a ready-made frame that includes everything you need to display your image. Some frame styles make use of a mat, and many ready-made frames include a mat and backer board. If you desire to highlight your image with a mat, be sure that the style of ready-made frame you select includes a mat of the correct orientation and opening size.
Tip: As you explore ready-made framing options, keep in mind that you will have the broadest range of choices when you focus on framing prints of the most popular sizes. Therefore, you will find the best selection of framing and matting choices when you are seeking to frame a print that is one of the following: 5" x 7" --- 8" x 10" --- 11" x 14" --- 16" x 20".
For a broad selection of quality ready-made frame solutions, visit Frames and Framing Supplies at Blick Art Materials.
Be sure to explore the Blick links to both Picture Frames, and Matboards > Pre-Cut Mats for a good overview of what is available. For a museum quality gallery style frame approach, take a look at Nielsen and Bainbridge ready-made metal frames in the Blick Picture Frames area. I have purchased a number of Nielsen Bainbridge ready-made metal frames from Blick. The frames and Blick's customer service are both impressive.
If you wish to compare, another quality online source is Utrecht Art Supply.
Before ordering prints of a particular size and shopping for a ready-made frame, it is also useful to understand how print dimensions, image aspect ratios, and orientations may impact your project.
Aspect Ratios
Aspect ratio is the ratio of the long side to short side of a print or digital image. For example a 4" x 6" print has an aspect ratio of the long to short side of 6/4 = 1.5. Likewise, the pixel dimensions of digital scan or camera image will have an aspect ratio of pixel dimensions.
Compact digital cameras typically produce images that have an aspect ratio of 1.33 and digital SLRs typically produce images with an aspect ratio of 1.5. The initial uncropped aspect ratio of a scanned image will be the same as the aspect ratio of the original being scanned.
On the other hand, common print sizes reflect a variety of aspect ratios.
| Print Size | Long/Short | Print Aspect Ratio |
| 4" x 6" | = 6/4 | 1.50 |
| 5" x 7" | = 7/5 | 1.40 |
| 8" x 10" | = 10/8 | 1.25 |
| 11" x 14" | = 14/11 | 1.27 |
| 16" X 20" | = 20/16 | 1.25 |
You can see from the above that both the 1.5 aspect ratio associated with a digital SLR and the 1.33 aspect ratio associated with a compact digital camera will require some image cropping adjustments to fit the initial aspect ratio of varied standard print sizes.
Read more about aspect ratios on page 2.
