Photography
Illustrations and photographs are important
Thirty to forty percent of the page space in a magazine is effectively used with illustrations and photos. We are happy with slides, prints, and electronic images. Please turn off the date stamp. It is difficult to remove that from your photograph. It may render a photograph useless, in fact. Never send a photo that has been printed on an inkjet printer. Send the electronic (digital) image instead. Do not rely on stills shot with a video camera. Our experience has been that these photos are not publishable.
Digital Images
Electronic photo files must be high resolution -- at least 300 dpi -- to be usable for print reproduction. 4.2 to 6.2 megapixel cameras are up to the task if you use their high-resolution settings. The simplest advice is to use the highest resolution possible and the super-fine compression option.
This may help: email and web photos look great at 72 dpi (dots per inch), but our magazine printer requires that all photos be 300 dpi. To figure out what size (in inches) your image (which you have in pixels) can run at 300 dpi, divide the number of pixels by 300 to get the final print size in inches. An 800 x 600-pixel image can make an 11 x 8-inch screen image at 72 dpi, but it winds up being only 2.7 x 2-inches in our magazine. Not good enough.
If you want to take digital photos for publication: 1200 x 1600 pixels is the absolute minimum size that works for us. That image can be printed (at 300 dpi) as a 4 x 6-inch photo. No larger. To run an image as large as a 5 x 7, it needs to be 1500 x 2100 pixels. A full-page image is 2500 x 3500 pixels. If you give us a very small image (such as a 3 x 5, which is 900 x 1500), it limits our ability to do page layout. So larger images are better.
However, please do not send huge unsolicited images by email. Before sending those large high-resolution images, send small jpgs (900 x 1500 pixels or smaller). And just because you can put a lot of images on a CD does not mean you should. Choose the best shots, do not make us open and look at every shot you took. We have incredibly short attention spans. We do have an FTP site if you have that capability for sending large files. Contact Karen@goodoldboat.com for more information.
Do not manipulate your images for us (using Photoshop and other image software). Send your files as .jpg or .tif files without doing any color management or sharpening. We will do the conversions. An image is degraded with each modification. So do not modify it in advance, please.
If the photo editor's comments (above) sound grumpy, wait until you hear from the technical editor! Understand that we have had to deal with a lot of problem files. Often the same problems over and over. Sometimes we get frustrated by the repetition...even though it may be new to you.