Digital Art

YOUR HALFTONE PLATES AND SCANNED DRAWINGS

Photographs have a continuous tone, and when they are printed, whether in a magazine or on your home or office printer, they need first to be transformed into what is termed a halftone image. It consists for black and white photographs of many dots of varying size and spacing, which you can easly see by using a hand lens. Color reproductions, again whether in a magazine or produced on your color printer, consist of dots of several colors (usually three plus black) and sizes, spaced to achieve the color balance needed.

You may submit true, i.e., non-digital, photographs mounted on a separate sheet from any text material that goes on the same page. These may be all black and white or all color photographs, or a mixture of these. The plate should be designed for reduction to final exact size (page width: 11 cm maximum, page height: 17.6 cm maximum). Mark in pencil on the back the percentage reduction needed to achieve the correct size.

Some recent manuscripts have been submitted to us with what we thought were glossy photographic plates. Instead these were computer-generated images, some produced using only black ink, but nonetheless in reality halftone images consisting of dots of various sizes. Still others, looking for all the world like black and white images, had been printed on a color printer, so that the dots were of at least 4 colors. All these images had to be re-scanned by the printer to allow their use. Making a halftone from an existing halftone greatly degrades the image, producing far less contrast. Worse yet, the background in particular may consist of widely spaced dots of the 4 colors, but when made into a black and white image for Mycotaxon those hardly visible dots now all become black dots, and the background may become a murky, dark gray.

Our new printer, The Sheridan Press, has provided specific instructions on how authors should prepare digital images for Mycotaxon. We strongly recommend that you download their excellent booklet on digital art, available in web and PDF file from the Sheridan website. It explains in detail how to prepare a TIFF file of digital images such as scanned photographs or photographs made on a digital camera. A software program such as Adobe Photoshop® will allow preparation of such TIFF files.

Line Drawings present another set of problems. Easiest in many cases is to paste an original line drawing into the regular text material so that it will be reproduced in exactly the size and placement you plan. If your drawings need a different reduction from the text, you will need to mount the line drawing separately and mark it for the required reduction to fit the appropriate blank space on your manuscript.

If your drawings have been produced as digital materials with vector information, they can instead be submitted as an EPS file at 600 or 1200 dots per inch, again at the exact final printed size. This process is explained in the Sheridan Press PDF file mentioned above.

Rarely plates consist of both photographs and line drawings. Such mixed materials may require scanning at a different resolution. Again the Sheridan Press PDF covers this in detail.

You can also obtain a free, pre-submission review of your TIFF or EPS materials! Our printer has installed a file checking tool called Digital Expert that can verify your artwork. You are strongly advised to do this before submission of your manuscript. Typical errors are submission as RGB (red, green, blue) instead of B/W (black and white), or at low resolution, or at the incorrect final size.