Digital photos

[Rocker]

Can a printer or publisher enlighten me? Is there any fundamental reason why digital photos are unsuitable for publication? The Editor of an Australian woodworking magazine insisted that I provide ordinary photographic prints for an article, rather than .jpg files. Was this reasonable? Is there some inherent incompatibility between pixels and the half-tone printing process? If not, what sort of resolution is needed to ensure that a digital picture is of good enough quality to be suitable for publication.

:confused:

[silentC]

Not a printer or a publisher but I've supplied artwork to printers in both JPG and PDF format in the past and had no problems. In fact they generally do their pre-press setup on computer, so they are working with digitised information anway. There may be peculiarities in the magazine publishing world that I am unaware of.

That said, the average digital camera will not get close to film when it comes to resolution. A lot of press photographers use digital cameras now so that they can transmit images over the phone, but these cameras are at the upper end of the scale and the images are usually for newsprint.

Could be they just have a blanket ban on digital cameras because most people use 3.2 MP or less. There's also the colour issue. Many digital cameras do funny things with the gamut, especially in the reds. You'll get better colour and resolution by scanning a 35mm slide than you will get from the current crop of domestic digital cameras.

[Sir Stinkalot]

From my understanding a standard photo (size) is the equivelent of a 5MP camera. Many pros use upto 15MP to enable enlargements (A3 to A1 and higher) without loss of quality. It could be a fact that the mag isn't technically savy enough.

[Dean]

I'm an editor...

Here's the scoop:

Many magazines do accept digital prints these days.
My magazine certainly does.

It really depends on what size the editor wishes to print your photo at in the publication.
Magazines can be printed in DPI's up to 1200, however most mags set 300DPI for pohotgraphs or images as standard.

You have to remember that your monitor only displays pictures in 72DPI, so to get them to display on your monitor in print standard of 300DPI or greater, the image on the monitor actually displays at over 4 times the needed size. Or, in other words, in print, to maintain a good resolution, the size of the image seen on your computer screen has to be reduced down 4-5x to display the same detail in hardcopy print.

With digi cams, it all comes down to resolution. The more pixels, the better, but you can still get good print images with a 2MP camera. Just depends on what size u wanted them printed at. A 2MP camera is not going to produce a good full page image in print. You would need at least 5MP for a reasonable quality full page shot.

Good graphic designers can enhance images to have them print a little more clearly on paper. You have to be tech savvy to make digital images work for you.

The issue with refusing .jpg files is likely because .jpg is a compressed image format. A lot of people will over compress .jpg files resulting in loss of quality. If you have a good image program like Photoshop that allows you to set the level of JPG compression, than JPGs can work fine for print. In fact, our magazine pretty much uses nothing other than JPG images, although this is kinda essential as we are mostly publishing screenshots from computers anyway.

Hope that helps?

[Gumby]

This is a bit off topic but nice to report.
We lost our digital camera late November (was dropped getting out of the car and went unnoticed - and it wasn't me!) and so it was reported to the local police.

It turned up, undamaged last week. It was found by some people who lived about 30km away and they handed it in to their local police when they got home the next day. Unfortunately the police took 5 weeks to discover it had been reported missing (we had the serial number luckily) at another station. By that time I had purchased a new one

Anyway, it's nice to know there are still some honest people in the world. I rang them and ahve just sent them a couple of Gold Class Movie and drinks vouchers as a thank you.

[Rocker]

Dean,
Many thanks for confirming what I suspected, that the Editor I referred to in my post was being unreasonable in making a blanket refusal of any digital file (not just .JPG). I have Paint Shop Pro to manipulate the picture size and degree of compression. It seems to me that the correct editorial approach would be to specify the required number of DPI for an acceptable quality. say 300 DPI as you suggest, and ask authors to comply with that, rather than adopting the Luddite approach of a blanket prohibition on digital pictures.

[John G]

They may be refusing based on either resolution or image quality. JPG may be the standard format for the internet and home user, but it is not the standard for professional printers.

As far as image resolution is concerned, 5MP is the standard minimum for newspaper photographers. Colour glossy magazines may require a higher resolution, but I guess it depends on how large the printed photo will be.

As Dean said, they could print up to 1200DPI. For a typical 3.3Mp photo, this would only make it about 2" wide.

The other reason could be compression. Most digital cameras allow you specify the compression quality of the photo. But even better, some can capture the image as TIFF (no compression loss) instead of JPG. But the file size is much larger.

Increasing the quality in Photoshop is pointless, as the image quality cannot improve on the original image quality used by the camera. Creating a TIFF image from a JPG source is similarly pointless.

I think the reason they want a physical picture is so they can control the image quality themselves. But if they can't tell you their preferred format, and are refusing to take any sort of electronic photo, tell the stupid buggers at AWW to get into the 21st century!

[Rocker]

Well, I didn't intend to specify this; but actually it was not AWW, but AWR I feel they should also get some CAD software. Perhaps that is why their diagrams are pretty rudimentary compared to the high standard of their photos

[Tonyz]

damm after all that I need a drink Strong and long lasting

[Little Festo]

Well guess I'll have my little bich about certain Medical Journals. Some of these publications require "Glossy B&W Prints" of X-Rays and CAT scans. These images are reproduced as rather small images in the publication so massive/large scans are not necessary BUT all this aside, I can supply very large high quality scans saved as tiff files - sent on a CD with the doctors article BUT no the want hard copy. Luckily I have a high quality Dye Sublimation printer that can satisfy their needs. Oh well I guess that life wasn't meant to easy.

Peter

[Neil]

Rocker - Maybe it was their way of saying that your pics weren't up to scratch. I know for a fact that they do use digital and for their matter they often use it for their own photos.

If you use the best quality setting on your camera and it is at least 3.2 mp or more and you can save the pisc as high quality .tif files then I think you may find that they will use them.

They have used mine in the past. AWR is aiming for a better than average mag and as such set pretty high standards for their graphics. If yours aren't absolutely brilliant then I can understand them not accepting them

Cheers - Neil

[Rocker]

Neil,
Thanks for that info; but I am puzzled as to why they could not just specify the required parameters for their digital pics. I would have been quite happy to attempt to comply with their requirements. They didn't mind telling me, and I didn't mind hearing, that the main picture for my rocker article was not good enough quality (they sent their own photographer to take the pic).

Rocker