Dear Ruslana, Magazines prefer slides to digital images for several
reasons. First of all, magazines use images of far greater resolution
than is common in digital images or even slides scanned by photo
bureaus. This is necessary to get the same print quality we are used
to with traditional four-process color. I shocked my service bureau
once by insisting on 25,000 dpi – which was the lowest acceptable
quality for our design house! This level of resolution is not easily
achieved on anything less than expensive drum scanners – the flatbed
scanners used by most of us at home do something in the neighborhood
of 1200 dpi. In a magazine of high print quality, the difference is
noticeable. A digital image that looked great on a computer screen may
look really lousy when it gets into print – not what you want to
have happen.
Secondly, magazines need flexibility in sizing. There is a limit to
how much a digital image can be sized up or down. This is very
limiting to the art director, who may want to splash a great photo
across two pages, but can’t because it was submitted at a size only
suitable for 1 column width. (And wouldn’t you really want the art
director to be able to use it larger?) Down sizing poses similar
problems – if it was sent as a two page size, it may be impossible to
get it to the 1 column size the art director needs. (And wouldn’t you
rather have it used 1 column wide than not at all?)
There’s also added challenges with the many different formats used
for digital images: there’s just more room for things to go wrong.
Some formats won’t work with certain design programs (and design
departments don’t always have the most up-to-date software!), while
others work, but only if you fight and argue with it. Some work, but
not very well – the image is fuzzy or can’t be sized or whatever. If
you must send digital images, be sure you find out what format the
magazine uses – and be aware that different magazines may use
different formats.
With so many things to go wrong, most magazines would rather work
with the original slide and scan it themselves than have to cope with
the many and multiple headaches that come with digital images. Slides
are a standard format, with little to go wrong. I’ve had any number of
occasions when the digital images submitted wouldn’t open in Quark
(the design program used by most – but not all! – magazines), were
some weird format Photoshop didn’t recognize, had been submitted on a
media we weren’t equipped for (such as Zip disks in their early days),
had been corrupted in transit and were now unreadable, etc., etc.,
etc. When a slide comes in, you know you can use it. When a digitial
image comes in, you pray you can use it without wasting hours
struggling with it. If the art direcctor is on a tight deadline (as
we always seem to be), he or she may just chuck it aside in favor of
the sure thing.
Oh, by the way – magazines also can’t use postcards, brochures, or
other printed pieces. This once again comes back to the resolution
used by the magazine. If you take a magnifying glass and look at
printed pieces, you’ll see lots of little colored dots, which is what
makes up the image. When you scan at the high resolutions magazines
use, what you see is those little colored dots – not the image. The
result is not attractive, especially if the photo had to be sized.
Photographic prints are all right, and most magazines can work with
those. Slides are better, though, because the colors are truer :
prints are more dependent on the ability of the developer for their
color balance, offering a greater opportunity for some color blind
yokel at the lab to turn your blues green. Slides also seem to scan
better.
I know it’s a pain to have to use old technology such as slides, but
you really will be happier with the results – not just because
magazines will be more inclined to use them, but the reproduction
quality will be much, much better. And remember, never send the
originals! Duplicates aren’t that expensive to make, and the one time
you absolutely must have the slide back will be the time the slide
you mailed out got lost. All magazines work very hard to keep track of
the slides they request, but they go through a lot of hands, so
there’s lots of opportunity for one to go astray. We don’t like to see
it happen, but, well, Murphy’s law being what it is, it usually
happens when something is irreplaceable.
If anyone has any other questions about magazines and why they work
or why editors do the things they do, don’t hesitate to ask. I’ve been
a writer, an editor, and an associate publisher for jewelry trade
magazines, and I’ve worked in almost every aspect of magazine (and
newspaper) publishing. I’d be happy to answer anything I can, and if
I don’t know, I have lots of editor friends I can ask.
Suzanne
Suzanne Wade
writer/editor
SuWade@ici.net
Phone: (508) 339-7366
Fax: (520) 563-8255