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Last updated:
5/1/2008
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Photo Guide
The Right Scan For The Job: Scanning, Saving and Sending Photos
The photo requirements for commercial printing are different than for photos on your Web site.
- Scan your photos at 300 ppi and save them as JPEG files, or send the original JPEG files from your digital camera.
- Name (or label) your photos or files with the correctly spelled first and last name of the person in the press release. For example, if the press release identifies "Richard Smith," label the photo "Richard Smith" rather than "Chip Smith." Mail or email photos and press releases together.
- DO NOT send inkjet prints of scanned photos. Send digital photos or send the original photos.
What difference does resolution make?
Web Resolution images like the sample on the left, have detail removed so that Web pages will load faster.
The middle image would look good at 1" wide on most inkjet printers, but after processing it would look soft if used for magazine printing.
On the right is a scan intended to be an inch wide when printed in a glossy magazine. It would look like this sample on your computer screen. Depending on your monitor's resolution, it might be between 2" and 4"wide.
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| 72 ppi |
150 ppi |
Original digital image at 266 ppi |
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| ... but if you start with the lowest resolution and enlarge it to magazine resolution, the result would be a disaster. |
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Below: If an original photo is not easily available, you might be tempted to take a photo from a Web site to use. As you can see by these examples, a photo that looks good on your Web site, doesn't look good when it is enlarged to the resolution needed for commercial printing.
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| Web Resolution (72 ppi) |
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Web Resolution (72 ppi) upsampled to Magazine Resolution (266 ppi) |
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Why Magazine Printing Needs More Resolution Than Your Web Site
The enlarged pictures below demonstrate why you get different results if you try to use the same resolution for print and the Web.
  The picture on the left is enlarged to show the blocks of gray your computer monitor uses to reproduce a black and white photo. Each pixel can be any of 256 shades of gray. Color images use millions of colors.
The picture on the right is enlarged to show the varied sized dots used in commercial offset printing, the method used for magazines and newspapers. Since most offset printing presses are limited to a handful of solid colors of ink (such as solid black), graded sizes of dots, called halftones, give the illusion of varying shades gray.
It takes nearly 4 times the detail of a Web photo for a magazine photo to appear to be the same size and visual resolution in a magazine.
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