Insertable pictures

[Michael E. Burke]

I'm in a discussion with a couple of designers and I'm a little unsure about
what questions to ask.

One says it is OK to insert jpegs and gifs in a publisher project for
preprinting, but the other says he only recommends bitmaps, tiffs and png's
sized to the correct dimensions, at 600ppi/dpi. I'm aware of the "lossy"
nature of jpegs and gifs, but is that going to make a difference in
Publisher? Should I use png's and tiff's?

Thanks,

Mike Burke

 

[Odysseus]

I'm in a discussion with a couple of designers and I'm a little unsure about
what questions to ask.

One says it is OK to insert jpegs and gifs in a publisher project for
preprinting, but the other says he only recommends bitmaps, tiffs and png's
sized to the correct dimensions, at 600ppi/dpi. I'm aware of the "lossy"
nature of jpegs and gifs, but is that going to make a difference in
Publisher? Should I use png's and tiff's?

600 ppi is overkill for offset printing; aside from containing four to
seven times as many pixels as are required for 150-lpi screening, you
can't properly judge the sharpness. If possible, size the images in
Photoshop or similar to the correct physical dimensions at a resolution
between 1.4 and 2 times the screen ruling you intend to use, using
Bicubic resampling (if any is required), and sharpen as the last step
before saving.

The types of compression used by the GIF and PNG formats are lossless,
but since they were designed for screen display, only RGB colour is
supported -- a major drawback unless you have well-tuned colour
management. Same for Windows Bitmap (.bmp), but greyscale or lineart is
generally fine in this format. High-quality (minimally compressed) JPEGs
in CMYK colour are usually quite acceptable for printing, unless we're
talking art-book quality.