Formatting Images

Formatting images properly can mean a world of difference when the magazine is being printed. Night and day. It's that important. Look at issues from just a few years back, like 2000 or so. They images are all in pretty rough shape, mostly because they weren't formatted properly. Thing is, it's super easy to format images. First off, we need to brush up on a few terms.

PPI stands for pixels per square inch. That's generally how many PPI printed. LED computer monitors (flat screen) can only show images at a resolution of 72 PPI. This is why sometimes you will see a grainy image that is linked on a web site. You have to click on them to see them at the proper size, which is sometimes way bigger than a computer monitor. Anyway, we do not want images that are taken at a resolution of anything lower than 300ppi.

It's easy to find out the resolution of a photo!

Image > Image Size 

Now we can see the image properties!
From here you can see that the image I am looking at is currently 72 ppi. This is ok for use on the web, but not in the magazine... unless it's very very small. The only way we can use this picture in the magazine is if we shrink it.

Ok, so we look at another picture...
At first glance this doesn't look right at all! It's resolution is still way too small. But, look at the size of the image. At 54" x 36" it's ok. We can just set the picture to 300 ppi and everything will be ok.

Here's the same image scaled so that we can get an idea of how large it can be printed at 300ppi
Notice that you can set the resolution and size higher if you click resample Bicubic. You can get away with quite a bit here but don't go too large or you'll get distortion.

One more thing about formatting pictures.
When in grayscale you have to adjust the contrast to make the image show up clear in print. Use the following features if you don't know how to color balance, which is slightly more detailed. If you use both "Auto Levels" and "Auto Contrast" and get a bad image, then the image isn't going to turn out well.

Image > Adjustments > Auto Levels & Auto Contrast work miracles

There is a lot more to know. Please expand upon this topic, and perhaps add a few other pages. Here are some links to good tutorials that are helpful.

It takes practice, experience, mistakes, and problems to get a grasp on photoshop. Remember to log mistakes on the wiki so that members can learn in the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_editing