Re: Print-ready Graphics Problem

[Sean Brierley <seanb_us -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

I would guess this:

"The firm" reduced the size of the screen-capture
graphics by downsampling. On a Windows platform, a
screen capture is normally supplied a resolution hint
of 96 ppi. Yours have 92 *and* are 60% smaller than
the original. That can only happen if you delete
pixels from the image.

If you delete pixels from the image, the image loses
clarity, sharpness, etc.

What I recommend you do is to use the original screen
captures and reduce their size on the printed page by
increasing the resolution value. That is, a 96 ppi
image will appear larger in the text column than the
same image set to 120 ppi. 150 ppi will be even
smaller.

Setting the resolution in this manner does not delete
pixels.

Also, the best resolution really depends on the press
being used. Theoretically, you need to multiply the
linescreen of the press by the square-root of 2 to
determine the optimal resolution for rasters. But, you
could always test. For example, for 500x500-pixel
screen captures in one-color, I've found 120 ppi does
well from my 133 lpi press, even though 188 is
optimal.

So, try upping the resolution rather than deleting
pixels.

Cheers,

Sean

--- Dawson McKnight <dawsonmcknight123 -at- yahoo -dot- com>
wrote:
> On screen and in print, the screenshots
> are
> pixilated and "fuzzy"-looking to the point of being
> worthless. The document hasn't gone to the printer
> yet, so there is still a little time to fix the
> problem.
> 
> The design firm requested that we send all of our
> screenshots to them as TIFs (CMYK, 24-bit, and
> "uncompressed"). The resolution of the screenshots
> is
> 92 DPI. The firm had to reduce the size of the
> screenshots to about 60% of their original size to
> fit
> them into the document. They are laying out the
> document in Quark.