Aspect ratio calculator: black bars or a crop?
Enter an image size and a screen size to compare fitting the whole picture with filling the screen. See the bars, the crop and how much of the original image disappears.
Same picture. Two choices.
A 1920 × 1080 picture on a 1440 × 1080 screen fits with 135-pixel bars above and below. Filling the screen removes 25% of the original image area.
The diagram draws a source rectangle at your entered proportions. It is an illustration, not a frame from your film.
What the numbers mean
“Fit” scales both dimensions by the smaller screen-to-source ratio, preserving the whole picture. Any unused area becomes a bar. “Fill” uses the larger ratio and crops the excess around the centre. Neither option stretches the image.
Bars are measured in display pixels per side. Cropping is measured as a percentage of the original picture’s area, not a percentage of the screen. In the example, fitting makes a 1440 × 810 image with 135 pixels above and below; filling retains 1440 of the original 1920 columns, removing 25% of the area.
This is geometry for square pixels and a centred crop. A film with black bars already encoded in the file, anamorphic pixels or a changing aspect ratio needs extra context. Read our illustrated aspect-ratio guide before assuming every bar is a display error.