Billboard Aspect Ratio

Question

Hello! I've created a design for a billboard as W 3098 pixels x H 845 pixels for one billboard company, but we ended up buying space with a new company.

The new billboard company said the billboards are 10’ x 35’ with creative specs as follows:

Content resolution must be W 1056 pixels x H 288 pixels
Aspect Ratio: 3.67 : 1
"The ad looks great however your designer needs to format it to the Pixel Ratio of
288 high x1056 wide."

In photoshop, I went to:

View > Pixel Aspect Ratio and set it to 3.67
Image > Image Size and set it to W 1056 pixels x H 288 pixels

The image is very long and stretched out now. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks to anyone who can assist.

Semaphoric · Accepted Answer

They are referring to the aspect ratio of the document, 1056 divided by 288. Ignore Pixel Aspect Ratio, and make your doc 1056x288.

Conrad_C · Answer

Semaphoric is correct. Pixel aspect ratio and document aspect ratio are very different things, and your job only involves document aspect ratio.

One way to get exactly what you want is to select the Crop tool, and in the options bar, set the type to Ratio, enter the pixel dimensions, and crop to that. The Crop tool does use document aspect ratio, not pixel aspect ratio. In the same Crop tool menu, you can also use the W x H x Resolution option for this.

Pixel aspect ratio is literally about the aspect ratio of the pixels, not the document. Photoshop has it because many years ago, it was necessary to edit images that came from or would be used in video projects using older frame formats where the pixels had a rectangular, not square, aspect ratio. As far as I know, pixel aspect ratio is never used in jobs intended for print.

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