A nice crisp picture is always something to be admired in the yearbook. When submitting your digital images to the yearbook, remember you want to submit a photograph with good resolution. Resolution is measured in dots per inch (DPI) and to have a crisp picture the DPI should be as close to 300DPI as possible. Having a digital image below 250DPI will not have good resolution and having a digital image above 300 DPI is not necessary. If you run into the problem of having a picture that is below 250DPI, it is recommended that the picture is retaken instead of altered in a software program like Photoshop. The reason for this is because an image holds a fixed amount of information, when you try to add to that information the software must guess at which pixel to add based on the other pixels in the picture. The result of this process is often a pixilated or fuzzier picture than before it was altered.
If you have a picture on a digital camera that was taken at a high quality setting, the image will still work. They will have a low resolution, typically 72 DPI, but the image size will be large enough to compensate for the resolution. This is because the images actually have the extra pixels needed to increase the resolution when decreasing the size of the photo.
Where you get your photos for the yearbook is also important. Images from the web are often of a low resolution, print poorly, and tend to be copyrighted. While using web images is not recommended, if you can find one that works for you, then by all means use the special image. You can import the web image to EZBook, and just make sure to watch for the resolution of the image. All of your digital images will be stored within your saved EZBook file after you have imported them. As a result of this, you will not need to send the actual image files to us when you submit your book for publishing. EZBook accepts only RGB images. Any other images such as CMYK will need to be converted to RGB before they will be able to be imported.
Digital images should be taken from a camera that is set in the 4-5 megapixel range. Why not any higher, you might be asking yourself. This is because many digital cameras take pictures that are much larger than needed. Reducing the megapixels will ensure that your picture is not too large.
When using conventional film photographs ask your local photo finisher to provide you with a High Resolution RGB CD. You can then import the pictures to EZBook, it is recommended that the film images be cropped or edited before being imported to EZBook.
If you choose to scan pictures, the resolution must be set to 300 DPI for a scan at 100%. If you plan to enlarge a photo after importing, then the resolution of the scan must be increased by the same magnitude to compensate for the enlargement. For example, a two inch picture scanned at 300 DPI will be two inches when placed on a page. However, that same image scanned at 600 DPI would allow you to make the image as large as four inches on your page because the image would be 300 DPI at four inches.
Nikon Camera Users – Nikon sRGB color profile embedded in them will print very dark when imported into EZBook. This non-standard color profile will need to be removed from all of the images before they will be able to be imported
JPEG, TIFF, and PNG are all acceptable file formats. These formats are chosen when you save your images either in scanning or image editing software. JPEG files should be saved at high quality and are the preferred file format because of their small size. PNG is typically used for clip art because of the ability to set the background of the image to be transparent. You should not use PNG for candid’s.
Now that you know the image requirements for creating your yearbook, you can start to look through your images and select the best ones. You can take new pictures of exciting moments that will forever be saved once you put it in your yearbook.