I design, produce and edit publications for online and print. Publications include newspapers, magazines, visitor guides, marketing communications, presentations, newsletters for non-profits, and sometimes multi-volume proposals for government projects. I strive to produce each publication with edited content and a selection of the best images available to clearly communicate to your audience, and top it off with a final sizing, sharpening and toning of all images to the exact specifications of the printer.

This final step sounds like something every designer would be doing, but it is commonly not the case. Even in online forum discussions among professional designers, there is often little agreement about how files — particularly image files — should be processed. Many designers who have been doing this work for decades provide images which are not processed, or have only been converted from RGB to CMYK, leaving them at super high resolution. Unnecessarily high resolution can result in dark, muddy images when printed.

I have learned from working on publications printed on newsprint, a most challenging and unforgiving media, that the resolution of images for newsprint should be strictly between 220 and 250 dots per inch (not 300 d.p.i. or higher). To meet that resolution with a degree of precision, each linked image file should be re-sized for its size in the layout, brightened a tad to compensate for dot gain, and usually sharpened to give it a crisp look. The same care can be given to images for higher resolution printing, but they would be sized for a higher resolution recommended by the printer. Prepress software at the printer can correct some of these issues before it gets on press, but sizing images and toning them can make them look spectacular in print.