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WHEN A PUBLISHER ASKS FOR PHOTOS by Pamela White
While requirements from various publishers will vary by their reproduction process and their mechanical setups, you will find three essential formats that you must understand to provide photographs to illustrate your stories.
Two of the requests will involve digital photography. As recently as 2000, the preponderance of photo illustrations were still taken by film cameras. With the boom in both digital photography and digital processing, that tide has turned.
Most digital photography requirements will focus on one major element: image resolution. For top-quality reproduction, final image resolution must be maintained at between 200 and 300 dots per inch, or dpi. Most newspapers and many magazines will use 200 dpi pictures; some of the glossier magazines that have high reproduction standards will call for 300 dots per inch. Anything less will not be acceptable.
To achieve these resolution standards, you will need a camera of at least 3.1 megapixels capability. Most good quality and above digital cameras on the market today will provide this resolution. But it is important to remember that high resolution has to start with the original shot and carry through all processing – so you must turn those 3.1 megapixel cameras up to their highest quality BEFORE you take your pictures. See your camera’s guide for how to take your pictures at the highest resolution.
You will need, as well, a decent photo manipulation program. For most people, Adobe’s Photoshop Elements or Micrografx’s Picture Publisher provide simple, relatively intuitive instructions and drop-down menus that will allow you to do the minimal manipulation you will need to do. And both have adequate automatic correction functions – for color balance, sharpening, contrast and so forth – that you don’t have to be an expert to get good pictures.
For high resolution pictures, you will need to find a minimum photo size, in inches or picas, that your publisher wants for publication. At high resolutions, size will sometimes push photo file sizes out of the range of many e-mail programs, so be ready to find an alternative way to transmit these photographs (an 8” x 10”, 200 dpi picture will have a file size of more than 7 megabytes in JPEG format, and more than 12 megabytes in a TIFF format).
And, speaking of formats, your publisher will tell you (especially since you’re going to ask) what file format is preferred: JPEG, which compresses files to make them up to 40 percent smaller; GIF, which uses a different, less efficient but more reliable compression system, or TIFF, which sends pretty close to a raw file. WARNING: if you use a compressed format, especially JPEG, and the publisher doesn’t want that, the picture will be useless.
If you’re sending pictures solely for web publication, everything gets easier. Because computer screens maximum of 72 dpi, web publications only need 72 dpi for their use. Because of that, if file size is a problem, you can reduce the resolution as needed, no matter what the photo size, as long as you don’t go below 72 dpi. As a result, large picture files usually end up less than 1 megabyte, well within the range of virtually every e-mail limit.
If you find a publisher who wants photos from a film camera, only the most experienced of photographers will be able to illustrate their work. Low speed (ISO 64 or 100) 35 mm slide film has been the standard for many publishers, and others have required mid- to large-format negatives or slides of 2¼” x 2¼” or larger – and if you have cameras that use that film, you don’t need to be reading this anyway.
****** Pamela White is the publisher of Food Writing, an online newsletter for writers, and the teacher of Eat, Drink, and Make Money: All About Food Writing, an online 8-week course. More information is on www.food-writing.com . She is the author of Fabjob’s Guide to Becoming a Food Writer at http://www.FabJob.com/foodwriter.asp?affiliate=2464.