20 March 2008

What Types of Images Work

If you are scanning the images from photographs, it is better to save them in either TIFF or EPS format. These image formats will best preserve the colour and sharpness of your pictures. File formats like GIF or JPEG compress the picture's colour and pixel resolution. This can cause colour shifts and blurring. JPEG and GIF are the most commonly used image types on Web pages and are not adequate for offset printing.

You should scan your images using a resolution of 300 dpi at the final dimensions you intend to use them. Don't scan at 300 dpi and then enlarge the picture in your layout program. Images taken from web pages are generally 72 dpi and using them will result in pixilated (blurry) images.

If you are using pictures from your digital camera, we recommend that you bring them into your imaging software and make sure that they are the correct size and pixel resolution. For instance, if your camera puts out a typical image of 1280 x 960 pixels at 72 dpi you get about 17" x 13" of photograph (at 72 dpi). This is the same amount of detail as an image which is 4" x 3" at 300 dpi (just divide the pixels by 300 to arrive at the optimum reproduction size for offset printing, if the size is larger than you need for your job you can safely reduce it, however you cannot make it larger than the reproduction size.