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photography equipment

Carol Wallace wrote:

<I invested in a really good quality digital camera that will take high
resolution TIFF files - often they are 25MB or more when I download them
from the camera. ould that be suitable for print? I have sent photos to
a couple of glossy magazines using that and they looked fine to me - but
then my vision isn't what it could be>

Do you mean they looked fine to you on your computer screen or they looked fine when published by the magazines? The proof is in the pudding. If the photo editor was happy with the images then that's a good sign (though not conclusive!!). You are starting off on the right foot however, capturing a hi-res tiff. But what you see on your monitor is NOT the same as what it will look like in print, unless your monitor has been properly calibrated (using software available for that purpose) to the profiles of the printer the magazine is going to be printed on. Not your epson or HP inkjet, but the actual press.

The short answer to your question then is yes, the file size should be big enough for reproduction up to 8x10 or so in a glossy magazine, but the longer answer is, as long as the people handling the file (including you) know what they are doing. There are a great many things that can be done to a perfectly good digital file that can ruin it, without you knowing you are ruining it. If it's a jpeg, you are going to suffer loss of data every time you open & close the file, and even more every time you work on it, whether it's color correction, sharpening or anything else. If you do some work on a jpeg, ship it off to the magazine & they then do more, it's anyone's guess how it's going to look by the time it goes to press.

Regardless of whether it is a tiff or jpeg, the someon must do a conversion to cmyk (which is how presses see color as opposed to how our monitors & inkjet printers see it, which is in RGB). That someone must know the profile of the output device (the specific printer it's going to be printed on), or else it will likely look like mud, or worse.

There's a whole lot more to providing digital files, enough for a book, but hopefully you get the idea. When you start to shoot digital, you become the lab and the pre-press house. So whether your files are good for the magazine depends on a great many factors other than just the file size, though that is a good starting point.

Rich Pomerantz

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