how do I increase the resolution of an image?

[jojoba]

Following this thread, where I got advice on converting some text in Word into images:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1374830

my publisher has come back to me and said they need higher resolution images, with the following message:

Figure 1 has been saved at a low resolution of 156 dpi. Please resupply at 600 dpi.

So, I have four images that I need to increase the resolution for. What's the best way of fixing this?

These are their general instructions for images (but I don't know what a lot of it means ):

Supply photographs as TIFF files, saved with a PC preview (if possible) and cropped close to the edge of the figure to minimize the white space surrounding the image. The TIFF should be saved at a resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch) at final size. Supplying uncompressed TIFFs is preferable, but if the image is very large, compression software can be used
If used, please tell us the type of compression used (e.g. LZW, WinZip, etc.)
If you are not able to supply figures in TIFF format, we can also accept EPS files. They should be exported or saved in 8 bit if the photographs are black and white (32 bit if they are colour). The files should be given an EPS extension (e.g. Fig01.eps)

[MCAsan]

Use something like Photoshop Elements 11 or OnOne's Perfect Resize. As I remember Resize was the fractal resizer that has been around for years.

http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/perfect-resize/

[jojoba]

Originally Posted by MCAsan

Use something like Photoshop Elements 11 or OnOne's Perfect Resize. As I remember Resize was the fractal resizer that has been around for years.

http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/perfect-resize/

Thanks, I'll check this out!

[Designer Dale]

Originally Posted by jojoba

Following this thread, where I got advice on converting some text in Word into images:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1374830

my publisher has come back to me and said they need higher resolution images, with the following message:



So, I have four images that I need to increase the resolution for. What's the best way of fixing this?

These are their general instructions for images (but I don't know what a lot of it means ):

I followed the link to see what you did to get to where you are and it just won't work. A screenshot is just a picture of the computer screen and can't be sharper than your screen is. Upscaling with an image editor like PhotoShop is a process in which the software "guesses" at what should be in the extra space you create when you increase the resolution and it is never sharp, especially when going from around 160 dpi to 600 like they want you to. The image at the end of this post is a screenshot of text upscaled to 600 dpi. It sucks.

What you need to do is to type the required text into a vector program like Illustrator and convert the type to Outlines. This makes it into a scalable image and can be made as big as needed without any of the "jaggies" you have in your current version. Save this as an eps or pdf file and your client/boss can make it as large as needed.

I did the pdf here with Illustrator but Inkscape might do what you need. I have the first but not the latter.

I ran into the problem you are experiencing when I put the tutorials for Photo of the Day together. In order to make some of the screenshot text readable I had to type it and replace the screenshot text. You can copy the text in your Word document and paste it into an app like Illustrator to get just what you need.

Note: The work "text" is a screenshot of that word in the pdf increased by 800%

Good luck.

Dale

[jojoba]

Originally Posted by Designer Dale

I followed the link to see what you did to get to where you are and it just won't work. A screenshot is just a picture of the computer screen and can't be sharper than your screen is. Upscaling with an image editor like PhotoShop is a process in which the software "guesses" at what should be in the extra space you create when you increase the resolution and it is never sharp, especially when going from around 160 dpi to 600 like they want you to. The image at the end of this post is a screenshot of text upscaled to 600 dpi. It sucks.

What you need to do is to type the required text into a vector program like Illustrator and convert the type to Outlines. This makes it into a scalable image and can be made as big as needed without any of the "jaggies" you have in your current version. Save this as an eps or pdf file and your client/boss can make it as large as needed.

I did the pdf here with Illustrator but Inkscape might do what you need. I have the first but not the latter.

I ran into the problem you are experiencing when I put the tutorials for Photo of the Day together. In order to make some of the screenshot text readable I had to type it and replace the screenshot text. You can copy the text in your Word document and paste it into an app like Illustrator to get just what you need.

Note: The work "text" is a screenshot of that word in the pdf increased by 800%

Good luck.

Dale

Thanks so much for this thought out response.

Since posting the OP and trying to sort this out, I've realised what you just said - that the screen shots wouldn't work. So, I typed it up again in a table (to maintain the line numbering which I had initially just let Word generate), and converted it to an image using Paint (on my windows machine at work). I tried to set that to 600 DPI. I hope it's what they need. I'm going to try to resubmit now with those files attached and see what they say.

I'm going to check out the programs you mentioned, because I'll need to do this again in the future. Your 'text' image is really nice and crisp!

Thanks again, very helpful.

[Designer Dale]

Originally Posted by jojoba

Thanks so much for this thought out response.

Since posting the OP and trying to sort this out, I've realised what you just said - that the screen shots wouldn't work. So, I typed it up again in a table (to maintain the line numbering which I had initially just let Word generate), and converted it to an image using Paint (on my windows machine at work). I tried to set that to 600 DPI. I hope it's what they need. I'm going to try to resubmit now with those files attached and see what they've said.

I'm going to check out the programs you mentioned, because I'll need to do this again in the future. Your 'text' image is really nice and crisp!

Thanks again, very helpful.

Glad to be of help. If this is going to be a regular sort of thing, mixing text and images, have a look at Adobe's InDesign. It's one of the best page layout programs around. All of the PDF tutorials in the link in my sig were created with it and PhotoShop.

Note: Both PhotoShop and Paint are pixel based editors. You can save at different resolutions but you will have to rebuild it if you have to scale anything up. That's becaused it's made up of squares. Illustrator and Inkscape are vector based programs. They create images and text using mathematical formulas that let the product scale up or down without any lost sharpness. Publishers and printers love vector files. There aren't any vector photo editors yet because every digital or film image is made up of dots. When someone develops a vector image sensor for digital cameras, there will be the start of the next revolution in photography.

Dale

[jojoba]

Originally Posted by Designer Dale

Glad to be of help. If this is going to be a regular sort of thing, mixing text and images, have a look at Adobe's InDesign. It's one of the best page layout programs around. All of the PDF tutorials in the link in my sig were created with it and PhotoShop.

Note: Both PhotoShop and Paint are pixel based editors. You can save at different resolutions but you will have to rebuild it if you have to scale anything up. That's becaused it's made up of squares. Illustrator and Inkscape are vector based programs. They create images and text using mathematical formulas that let the product scale up or down without any lost sharpness. Publishers and printers love vector files. There aren't any vector photo editors yet because every digital or film image is made up of dots. When someone develops a vector image sensor for digital cameras, there will be the start of the next revolution in photography.

Dale

That's very useful info. I had no idea about all of this. Today has been a learning curve.

I'm trying to test inkscape now. It's asking for X11 which I'm in the process of downloading. I don't really understand what X11 is, but I'll feed it what it wants if it does the job I'm hoping this will work, because indesign and illustrator are a bit pricey for my needs (I just need to convert black and white text to images at regular intervals).

[snberk103]

Originally Posted by Designer Dale

Glad to be of help. If this is going to be a regular sort of thing, mixing text and images, have a look at Adobe's InDesign. It's one of the best page layout programs around. All of the PDF tutorials in the link in my sig were created with it and PhotoShop.

For simple stuff, would working in Pages and saving as a PDF work as well?

Originally Posted by Designer Dale

...When someone develops a vector image sensor for digital cameras, there will be the start of the next revolution in photography.
Dale

That is a very interesting insight ... You've touched off a chain of thinking for me, as I've been pondering this 'big question' for a little while. Thanks.

[jojoba]

I think Inkscape looks very promising, but I'm going to need a bit of time to work it out. At the moment, it's not formatting my table correctly and I'm not quite used to the UI yet. So, I'm going to send the publisher the files I have already created for this article, and then I'm going to invest some time in learning Inkscape so I can use it next time around.

Thanks, everybody

[jojoba]

So after a bit of experimentation and googling:

It appears that Inkscape doesn't really deal with tables (which is what I need), and the extension that is online doesn't seem to want to install with me. I've tried importing a table as text from pdf, but then some of the lines got jumbled so the letters appear on top of each other (the original pdf file looks fine).

So, I might have to rethink and use a different program.

[Designer Dale]

Originally Posted by jojoba

So after a bit of experimentation and googling:

It appears that Inkscape doesn't really deal with tables (which is what I need), and the extension that is online doesn't seem to want to install with me. I've tried importing a table as text from pdf, but then some of the lines got jumbled so the letters appear on top of each other (the original pdf file looks fine).

So, I might have to rethink and use a different program.

I looked up X11 and it seems to be related to Linux/Unix. I think Inkscape was originally written for Linux and X11 may make it work on Mac/Windows systems.

I don't have Word (or any Microsoft programs, for that matter __) and don't have Pages, either. All my text work is done with TextEdit and InDesign.

I tried making a simple table in Numbers and just copying and pasting it into Illustrator. It let me save it as an eps file. I couldn't upload that to the forum so I converted it to pdf. It looks like this.

Dale

[lucasgladding]

Originally Posted by jojoba

Following this thread, where I got advice on converting some text in Word into images:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1374830

my publisher has come back to me and said they need higher resolution images, with the following message:

So, I have four images that I need to increase the resolution for. What's the best way of fixing this?

These are their general instructions for images (but I don't know what a lot of it means ):

I just scanned the thread, so my apologies if I missed something. What did you create the original content with? Your best option is usually to just create a PDF, and send that to the publisher. Any publisher should be able to work with the format. Sometimes PDF doesn't get mentioned because publishers assume that PDF is too much hassle, which is definitely not the case on the Mac (you can create a PDF from the print window).

[Designer Dale]

Originally Posted by lucasgladding

I just scanned the thread, so my apologies if I missed something. What did you create the original content with? Your best option is usually to just create a PDF, and send that to the publisher. Any publisher should be able to work with the format. Sometimes PDF doesn't get mentioned because publishers assume that PDF is too much hassle, which is definitely not the case on the Mac (you can create a PDF from the print window).

The OP needs to convert portions of a Word document into a scalable image for his publisher. He can't just save the whole doc in pdf, which would be simple to do. Nothing ever is as simple as we would like it to be...

Dale

[Prodo123]

https://discussions.apple.com/thread...art=0&tstart=0
The automator method sounds pretty effective.

[Consultant]

Originally Posted by Designer Dale

The OP needs to convert portions of a Word document into a scalable image for his publisher. He can't just save the whole doc in pdf, which would be simple to do. Nothing ever is as simple as we would like it to be...

Dale

PDF, unless rasterized, can be set to different DPI using photoshop.

[lucasgladding]

Originally Posted by Designer Dale

The OP needs to convert portions of a Word document into a scalable image for his publisher. He can't just save the whole doc in pdf, which would be simple to do. Nothing ever is as simple as we would like it to be...

Dale

I don't think it's as hard as this thread makes it sound either, though. He could save the required page to PDF, save that PDF as a TIFF using Preview (specifying 600dpi on save), then crop that TIFF, again using Preview.

I don't see why the publisher can't just extract what they need from the PDF using Illustrator. It doesn't make much sense to send a raster image for simple text-based content.

[Prodo123]

Originally Posted by lucasgladding

I don't think it's as hard as this thread makes it sound either, though. He could save the required page to PDF, save that PDF as a TIFF using Preview (specifying 600dpi on save), then crop that TIFF, again using Preview.

I don't see why the publisher can't just extract what they need from the PDF using Illustrator. It doesn't make much sense to send a raster image for simple text-based content.

Agreed. The AppleScript link that I put up more or less automates this process.
First rendering a scalable PDF, then rasterizing it at 600dpi should work well. Although this does create a TIFF image, apparently there are issues with it creating multi-page TIFFs which are not well supported anywhere.

[jojoba]

Originally Posted by lucasgladding

He could save the required page to PDF, save that PDF as a TIFF using Preview (specifying 600dpi on save), then crop that TIFF, again using Preview.

Thanks everyone for the input, much appreciated.

I've now tried this option above and it seems to be straight forward. The only thing I can't work out is how to specify the DPI. When I save the cropped image as TIFF using preview, I only get the option to specify pixels per inch (or cm), not DPI (they are different, is that correct?). The final result turned out rather blurry.

[lucasgladding]

Originally Posted by jojoba

Thanks everyone for the input, much appreciated.

I've now tried this option above and it seems to be straight forward. The only thing I can't work out is how to specify the DPI. When I save the cropped image as TIFF using preview, I only get the option to specify pixels per inch (or cm), not DPI (they are different, is that correct?). The final result turned out rather blurry.

You can treat PPI (pixels per inch) and DPI (dots per inch) as the same thing. The difference comes down to the medium (images are pixels on the screen and dots on the printer).

Note that the blurriness could just be due to the zoom factor (i.e. 16.7%, 25%, 33.3%, etc). Try zooming to actual size and see whether the text is clear then. You can zoom to actual size using View > Actual Size.

[jojoba]

Originally Posted by lucasgladding

You can treat PPI (pixels per inch) and DPI (dots per inch) as the same thing. The difference comes down to the medium (images are pixels on the screen and dots on the printer).

Note that the blurriness could just be due to the zoom factor (i.e. 16.7%, 25%, 33.3%, etc). Try zooming to actual size and see whether the text is clear then. You can zoom to actual size using View > Actual Size.

Great, I think this has solved it. I zoomed to actual size and it looks crisp. The info pane says "Image DPI: 600 pixels/inch".

This should be fine, right?

Originally Posted by Designer Dale

I tried making a simple table in Numbers and just copying and pasting it into Illustrator. It let me save it as an eps file. I couldn't upload that to the forum so I converted it to pdf. It looks like this.

Dale

That looks really good. I wish Illustrator wasn't that expensive

[lucasgladding]

Originally Posted by jojoba

Great, I think this has solved it. I zoomed to actual size and it looks crisp. The info pane says "Image DPI: 600 pixels/inch".

This should be fine, right?

That looks really good. I wish Illustrator wasn't that expensive

It should be. If you want to double check, you can divide the image size by the DPI/PPI to see how many inches the image would be when printed. Those numbers should reflect how the content appeared when you created it in Word. Of course, the simpler solution would be just sending to your publisher and waiting for feedback.

There are alternatives to Illustrator, but nothing as mature. I have been watching Sketch, and that looks the most promising. If you're interested in that, I would send a feature request for table grids. It seems like an obvious feature, but even Illustrator didn't get the feature right away.

[jojoba]

Originally Posted by lucasgladding

It should be. If you want to double check, you can divide the image size by the DPI/PPI to see how many inches the image would be when printed. Those numbers should reflect how the content appeared when you created it in Word. Of course, the simpler solution would be just sending to your publisher and waiting for feedback.

There are alternatives to Illustrator, but nothing as mature. I have been watching Sketch, and that looks the most promising. If you're interested in that, I would send a feature request for table grids. It seems like an obvious feature, but even Illustrator didn't get the feature right away.

I think the bold will be option 1

I downloaded the trial version of Sketch and sent a request for tables. It looks pretty nice and yet not that expensive, but perhaps a bit over kill for my purposes. Now that I've figured out this pdf and preview thing, this should get me by for a while.

Thanks to everyone who's helped me out in this thread, much appreciated!

[Boutrosn]

My dad is going to Canada for a week and I want to get the iPhone 5. Here they are selling the 16GB unit for $1250 (Lebanon, Middle East)
I did a small research and found that the full price of the iPhone 5 in Canadian Apple Store is $708 American dollars

Before buying it, I want to make 110% sure that it would work with the network here. Take into consideration the different network frequency each country use.
In addition, we lately got 3G network, so 4G and LTE are out of the picture. Can i use it on 2G/3G

[Designer Dale]

Originally Posted by Boutrosn

My dad is going to Canada for a week and I want to get the iPhone 5. Here they are selling the 16GB unit for $1250 (Lebanon, Middle East)
I did a small research and found that the full price of the iPhone 5 in Canadian Apple Store is $708 American dollars

Before buying it, I want to make 110% sure that it would work with the network here. Take into consideration the different network frequency each country use.
In addition, we lately got 3G network, so 4G and LTE are out of the picture. Can i use it on 2G/3G

Wrong thread and sub forum for this question. Have a moderator delete it and ask again in the iPhone forum.

Dale