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Author Topic: Digitizing Illustrations for Publication?  (Read 1955 times)

Shamrock

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Digitizing Illustrations for Publication?
« on: November 15, 2009, 12:53:47 am »

Digitizing Illustrations For Publication?:

As a writer/photographer of nonfiction magazine articles, I often include illustrations with submissions.  In pre-digital days, these were color 35mm’s or b/w 8x10 glossy prints.

With digital now the way to go, which electronic format is best for illustrations submitted for publication … JPG, PDF, TIF?  How do these translate to minimal dpi, pixels, etc … and what do these terms really mean?

Lastly, should writer/photographers now digitize existing b/w prints and negatives?

Thanks.
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donpaluh

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Digitizing Illustrations for Publication?
« Reply #1 on: November 16, 2009, 12:20:22 am »

Quote from: Shamrock
Digitizing Illustrations For Publication?:

As a writer/photographer of nonfiction magazine articles, I often include illustrations with submissions.  In pre-digital days, these were color 35mm’s or b/w 8x10 glossy prints.

With digital now the way to go, which electronic format is best for illustrations submitted for publication … JPG, PDF, TIF?  How do these translate to minimal dpi, pixels, etc … and what do these terms really mean?

Lastly, should writer/photographers now digitize existing b/w prints and negatives?

Thanks.

Tough questions. First ask the publication to which you are submitting or see if they have guidelines. If they do not have specific guidelines, I would recommend PDFs. Many high-end ads, magazine spreads and even entire publications are created from this format.

For rasterized images such as photos, you should scan them at minimum of 250 (max 300) pixels per inch and the anticipated final size. Most references say that line art type illustrations should be at 1200 pixels in bitmap format: I have found it better to open them in Photoshop and make them 300 pixels per inch grayscale and save them that way. If you created the illustrations in a program like Adobe Illustrator, you can save that a PDF right out of Illustrator, and this will maintain the vector information resulting in a very sharp image.

Pixels are the little squares of specific colors that computer images are made from. Pixels per inch is how many there are in a single row per inch in length or width of the graphic: an image 1 inch x 1 inch that has 100 pixels in width x 100 pixels in length is said to be 100 pixels per inch. Dots are what the printing press makes to display an image on paper. This conversion is done when the image is set to the printing plates. So you don't need to worry about it except to know that you need to provide and adequate number or pixels (mentioned above) for a good, clean conversion.
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don paluh
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