What image quality for newspapers?

GobblyNob

Hello folks, recently I've been taking a lot of photos for work, and they asked me if I knew whether my images would be acceptable to submit to the Irish Times etc.

Now... I know my photos look good!

But does the press generally have rules about photos size/pixel/dpi etc?

I'm using a Canon 40d, and my two main lenses are nifty fifty and sigma 17-70mm ... old pieces of junk I know.

thanks anyway

Paulw

GobblyNob wrote: »

But does the press generally have rules about photos size/pixel/dpi etc?

Normal submissions are roughly 1-1.5mb in size at 300 dpi (yeah, technically I know that means very little).

You may need to discuss it with the editor before submitting.

GobblyNob

Is there a quick way to find out the DPI of my photo? I know I sound like a complete noob!

I'm not though, for example: http://i.imgur.com/IDrXaA9.jpg and http://i.imgur.com/WEVo3k5.jpg

So I should just email the editors of the Irish Times, Examiner etc and ask them? Anybody have experience of this?

edit: found out how to check the dpi. All my photos seem to have a DPI of 240. Is that as high as the 40D can go? I guess I'm fecked so!?? Unless there's a secret way to convert them to 300DPI when exporting them from Camera Raw. Any tips?

Apologies for so much noobyness.

Paulw

Most papers won't take randomly submitted images. Some won't take emailed images. It really depends.

Filesize is only one part.

An email to an editor may not get a response. They need to want what you have before they'll consider taking images from you.

Kenny Logins

GobblyNob wrote: »

Is there a quick way to find out the DPI of my photo? I know I sound like a complete noob!

I'm not though, for example: http://i.imgur.com/IDrXaA9.jpg and http://i.imgur.com/WEVo3k5.jpg

So I should just email the editors of the Irish Times, Examiner etc and ask them? Anybody have experience of this?

edit: found out how to check the dpi. All my photos seem to have a DPI of 240. Is that as high as the 40D can go? I guess I'm fecked so!?? Unless there's a secret way to convert them to 300DPI when exporting them from Camera Raw. Any tips?

Apologies for so much noobyness.

DPI means nothing unless you know what size the print is.

Divide each of the image's pixel dimensions by 300, and this will tell you how many inches wide/tall you can print at 300dpi.

Ballyman

Have a look at the front page of the star today and you will see the image quality of pics they will publish.

If your pic is newsworthy then regardless of quality, file size or anything else they will print it. Providing a contracted agency doesn't send in a similar pic of course, then there is 0% chance of your pic being published regardless of quality, file size or anything else!!

pixbyjohn

GobblyNob wrote: »

Is there a quick way to find out the DPI of my photo? I know I sound like a complete noob!

I'm not though, for example: http://i.imgur.com/IDrXaA9.jpg and http://i.imgur.com/WEVo3k5.jpg

So I should just email the editors of the Irish Times, Examiner etc and ask them? Anybody have experience of this?

edit: found out how to check the dpi. All my photos seem to have a DPI of 240. Is that as high as the 40D can go? I guess I'm fecked so!?? Unless there's a secret way to convert them to 300DPI when exporting them from Camera Raw. Any tips?

Apologies for so much noobyness.

Just for info >>>>>http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/changedpi.html or this>>
http://www.softorbits.com/batch_picture_resize/index.html

pixbyjohn

DPI setting by pixbyjohn, on Flickr

GobblyNob

Thanks for the tips.

Regarding whether the papers will accept my photos or not - they will accept them. My company gets their pics in the national papers every year. They're just trying to save costs by asking me to do it instead of hiring a "pro" photographer. I'm fairly confident I can do it, but we don't want to go through all the hassle only to find out that my pics won't be accepted due to some DPI rule or something.

Ballyman

If it's PR pics you are sending in then just ring the picture desk and ask them what format/size etc they want and they will tell you.

Corkbah

GobblyNob wrote: »

Thanks for the tips.

Regarding whether the papers will accept my photos or not - they will accept them. My company gets their pics in the national papers every year. They're just trying to save costs by asking me to do it instead of hiring a "pro" photographer. I'm fairly confident I can do it, but we don't want to go through all the hassle only to find out that my pics won't be accepted due to some DPI rule or something.

maybe the pics are in the paper because the photographer the company are hiring is a recognised PR photographer and the paper uses the photographers stuff knowing they can trust its 100%.

Do you know how to caption an image ? some papers have specific requirements in terms of captioning....some papers do not accept images from unknown sources so its likely that if you send in the images they could get ignored or not even past the spam filters.

ValueInIreland

Regarding file size: Any file that is 5mb+ when it is open is fine for Newspaper, but 10Mb is safer - in case it needs to be cropped etc.
DPI is not an issue for most publications, as long as the file is big enough, as most publications will re-size when choosing an image to publish anyway.
A full caption in File info is an absolute must (Who, What, Where, When & How). Don't include "today", "yesterday" etc. in the caption and try to second-guess when it may be used - just start the caption with the date the picture was TAKEN.
If you would like a byline, put this at the end of the caption (it may not be used, but if you don't put it there, nobody else will).
Check the spellings! Give the caption to somebody who is not involved in the shoot, ask them to read it and see if it all makes sense to them.
Save the (.jpg) image at a medium setting (5-8) and send it to the appropriate publications address.
Bearing in mind that everybody must start somewhere, but from reading your post, I would not hold out much hope of having anything published.
All too often, I have seen companies and their PR companies take the "cheap" option by not using a Pro, or releasing the pictures themsevles, only to piss off the editors (who may have actually had a slot for a good picture) and end up wasting everybody's time and money....
You may proove me wrong, but it's not easy getting great PR pics -AND getting them published!

GobblyNob

Corkbah wrote: »

some papers do not accept images from unknown sources so its likely that if you send in the images they could get ignored or not even past the spam filters.

The pics will be going through official channels.

Valueinireland, thanks for the helpful post. But why only save the photo in medium quality?

ValueInIreland

GobblyNob wrote: »

The pics will be going through official channels.

Valueinireland, thanks for the helpful post. But why only save the photo in medium quality?

You won't see the difference on screen, and certainly not in print. Also they will send quickly, or you can send more on an email without issues (keep emails under 10mb to avoid bounces).

delexical

Mmm, phone them and ask them what they need from you? As said before, if they're really worth their while they'll make a silhouette made with a pinhole camera on leaf using chlorophyll into printable form, never mind phone pics and screengrabs. If you're sending to multiple papers and want to cut their hassle to up chances of printing push the dpi up to 300 if your image is short of that natively, and resize/resample the image if need be. And if you're doing things in image editing software work in CMYK mode maybe. Spent a night having to convert all the damned tiffs in a magazine, re-compose them in quark, put them through distiller again because they'd been rejected by the printer for being 72dpi rgb files. Don't worry about that though, that's pic deck & layouts problem.

PS anyone here regularly using InDesign or Quark for picture books or anything? It's years since I looked at that software but am considering making albums, is InDesign best way to prepare for printing? Maybe there's a relevant thread on this?

Kenny Logins

Eh? You resampled all of the 72dpi images to 300? All that will do is fool the preflight, the images will still be sh!te.

delexical

Oh no I hadn't downsampled them to 72dpi from whatever their native dpi was, I'd simply unknowingly used defaults for web when preparing them as TIFFs and the physical dimensions of the images changed to correspond to 72dpi setting. Their physical dimensions on the page were manipulated in Quark. So I had to go pack and check the images and set them at 300dpi CMYK, then put all the pages back through Distiller again. Took a while on the computer we had for layout. This was a long time ago when I'd no one to explain this except printing company man on the phone. The TIFFs got included in the package however it was Distiller outputted them (again this was 10+ years ago and I've not used Quark/Distiller since, or printed 5k magazines!) and the printer req'd they be 300dpi CMYK TIFFs, no matter how they were laid out on the page. Had originally sent mix of jpegs and had already had it explained that they were supposed to be TIFFs. God that printer was sick of us by the end of that affair and we him.