articles/Nature/verysharppractice-page1

Very Sharp Practice - part 1 of 1 2 3 4 5 6

by Mike McNamee Published 01/06/2010

Don't Try This Unless You Are Serious!

graphSharpening remains contentious. We wrote on the topic in June last year and issues are still rumbling around. On a personal level only pre-sharpening of RAW files has been employed, followed by letting the Epson/Photoshop drivers and interface perform scaling of the image. This, we realise, is not 'best practice' but no complaints have been heard from any judges for images printed at 16"x20". We follow a similar practice for Professional Imagemaker pages and images.

If a photographer provides images we usually convert them to CMYK, change the resolution to 300ppi and then save a TIFF file without any additional sharpening. This is placed into InDesign and scaled to fit the layout, allowing the InDesign engine to transform the size 'on-the-fly'. Again no issues have been raised, other than a some pre-flight warning for 'low resolution'.

Low-resolution warnings on pre-flight are flagged when the effective resolution of the image on the page has fallen (because of scaling) to less than a set value (usually 250ppi). This almost invariably occurs with adverts provided by companies who do not employ professional design studios to prepare their advertisements (in the last issue, a value of 76dpi was used at one point).

Sometimes the scaling of an image to a double page spread causes a low-resolution warning. In this situation we will either obtain a higher resolution file, use a different image or perform careful scaling (using Genuine Fractals) sometimes followed by careful sharpening and, if required, proofing at full size. This, best practice, we usually employ for the cover shot.

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