Field of Science

300 dpi

300 dpi - 300 dots per inch; the minimum resolution limits for a publishable figure according to my publisher.  The problem is that you can find a great many illustrations and images that look just great on a computer screen but are about 75-95 dpi, one-third the required resolution.  To increase the resolution you can reduce the size, and suddenly a decent sized image gets really tiny.  And when you're looking for very particular botanical images it gets much harder.  Not just everyone happens to have an image of a hornwort with sporophytes laying around. And if they do have a good image, one rarely used, why they very reasonably think that it's use can command a pretty good price, which works out very well for both of us except the entire illustration budget for TPP's book is zilch.  That's right, zilch, so without the remarkable generosity of colleagues and people who post great images on the Creative Commons, us publishing paupers would be toast.  Got a good image of Takakia or Tmesipteris, let TPP know.  TPP would mention the program used to generate these images and plates for publication, but it might be mistaken for an endorsement.  While a very amazing program in terms of quality of the results, it is without question the most non-intuitive computer program TPP has ever used, and he's used a lot of them. 

1 comment:

RM said...

It might be considered "cheating", but if it's just an issue of getting around a publisher's automatic image checking code, you can try to rescale the image with your favorite image manipulation program.

You won't get an image that is as good as one that's originally 300 dpi, but if you use the right method (e.g. a single bicubic rescaling from the highest resolution original you can get your hands on for photos - you may want to try several and see which looks best for your image), it will look at least as good as an image printed at the original 72 dpi, and will pass most automated filters looking for 300 dpi.