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When you work with designers and printers, they often ask you for images to use in the piece they are producing for you. Their images needs are specific, and often it is not enough to provide just the image as it was taken on your digital camera. The following are some tips and things to think about when it comes to providing the correct image to your designer.

1. What does the designer/printer need from me?

• Photos appear best in documents when scanned at high resolution at the size they appear in print. If you aren’t doing your own design work, it is best to provide your designer with a print, a negative or a slide to scan. If you provide already scanned images, there may be a need to re-size the image, which often results in a loss of resolution. Scans are best from slide or negative, so if your designer has an appropriate scanner, provide them with a slide or negative.
• If you choose to do your own scanning, images for use in commercial print projects should be scanned at high resolution, at the size they will appear in print. There is a formula for determining optimum resolution, which is based on the LPI (lines per inch) of your printer’s equipment. However, for most purposes, 300 dpi is considered high resolution. (Newspapers and poster printers may require different resolutions. When someone requests a photo from you, always ask what resolution and format is needed).
• If you have a digital camera, you will need to set your image quality to the finest setting in order to get a good, high resolution photo. The print size your camera is capable of producing at high resolution is directly related to your camera’s number of megapixels. If you want to full cover size (8 1/2 x 11) high resolution images, your camera should have at least four megapixels.

Digital images may be captured as RAW, TIF or JPG. Set your camera to capture RAW or TIF for the highest amount of data. If your image processing software can’t handle RAW images, you may choose to work with JPGs. All captured photographs should be converted to TIF files before placement in publications.

2. What file formats are best for which purposes?

Digital cameras and scanners let you save files in a number of different formats. Some formats are clearly better for specific purposes than others. If your original file, say from a digital camera capture, is not the best format for your purpose, you can change the file format using a image manipulation program like Adobe Photoshop.

As a general rule, photos to be placed in print documents should be saved in TIF format. Photographs used for web pages and on-screen programs such as PowerPoint presentations should be JPG format.

The following table outlines some of the basic file formats and their uses.

3. Getting the image to the designer/printer.

High resolution TIF images tend to be large and can cause some problems with e-mail—some servers and providers restrict the size of files that can be exchanged. Further, some servers corrupt files in the e-mailing process. One way to address these issues is to compress files before sending using Stuffit or WinZip. In fact, images should always be compressed before sending just to prevent file corruption.

Uploading to a printer’s FTP site might be an option as well—ask your printer.

And of course, there’s always the option of burning a CD or copying files to a Zip disk and delivering via “sneaker net.”

This article is copyright © 2007 In Focus Design, and may not be republished without permission. It was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 12:07 pm and is filed under photography, print design. You can subscribe to receive RSS notifications regarding new In Focus Design articles, or you can trackback to this article from your own site.