Are the photos you submit large enough to print?
I planned to give the article feature treatment. Then I looked at the photos the author sent.
Forget any thoughts about giving a photo half-page treatment — or even three inches by five. With the low-resolution images I received, I couldn’t print them much larger than a postage stamp.
Had the magazine been online-only, I might have gotten by. But four-color printing is a different story.
Had the magazine been online-only, I might have gotten by. But four-color printing is a different story.
It’s a matter of numbers. The photos I received measured only 640 x 480 pixels.
Because computer screens use a resolution of just 72 pixels per inch, those images could work in an online newsletter at nearly 8.9 inches wide and 6.7 inches deep.
But a quality magazine prints at more than four times that resolution: 300 dots per inch instead of 72. The maximum size I could print those 640 x 480 photos? Just 2.13 inches wide and 1.6 inches deep.
If you hope to submit digital photos for publication, do you need a sophisticated camera? Hardly. My nine-year-old, low-cost digital camera yields photos with 12 megapixels (4,000 x 3,000). That’s big enough for a 13.3- x 10-inch photo.
The trick is to know how — before you take a picture — to set the image resolution on your camera or phone.
If there’s any chance you’ll want to send the picture to a print magazine, select the highest resolution. Especially if it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event.
