Guide for submitting photographs to Reprinted from the White River Productions website Policies: Anything you submit can be returned after use. We prefer email as a quick means of communication. When submitting material, an email will let us know it’s coming and we’ll acknowledge its arrival via return email just as soon as it’s here. If you want your material returned, carefully mark it “return” with your name on each and every item. Without a name on an item it is likely to get “lost” in the files and be very difficult to retrieve. The name can be put on a “yellow sticky post-it” if writing on the object is not feasible (on an original timetable, for example). Please be diligent to put your name on everything. Sending anything in the mail is a risk. This risk can be essentially eliminated by insuring valuable photographs, timetables, maps or similar un-replaceable items. Ask yourself “If this package were to be lost, would I be able to replace its contents easily?” If yes, regular mail is probably OK, if no, it is probably worth the nominal fee for insurance, certified mail, or return receipt mail. While we take great care of photographic material while it’s here, and always use insured mail to return valuable images, White River Productions is not liable for any damage that occurs to photographic resources. Every effort is made to handle all material in the safest manner, and to date we have seen very little damage occur to contributors’ slides, negatives, or prints. Images: Slides and Prints: WRP depends on the images on file for the majority of the photographs that are run in publications. WRP does all the scanning in-house, which means that your originals never leave the office, and reside in a fire-proof safe while here for scanning. Slides are never demounted; they stay in their original mounts. They are not cleaned with any chemicals, and they’ll come back exactly as you sent them. Images: Scans: In many cases reader scans are unacceptable for publication in color. There are many places where things can go awry, but this technology gets better all the time. Good scans are paramount to a quality magazine, and even with the many tools available in Photoshop, color reader scans are often not usable. We do, however accept scans, either via email or on CDs, and remember to format images for both PC and MAC. Please, please, when providing scans, submit only raw scans with no manipulation. Images manipulated in any way will be rejected - we simply lose control of image quality when scans are manipulated. While they might look great on your computer screen, monitors lie, and the results on the printed page are usually unacceptable. Again, please do not manipulate scanned images in any way. Images: Digital Images: Digital technology is advancing, and we do accept digital photos. We prefer tif images, not jpegs because jpegs have compression characteristics that result in less than ideal printing. Low resolution images are unacceptable. Digital images must be at least 4 megapixels to be useful at all, and again, it is best to shoot tif images rather than jpegs. Smaller images restrict our ability to run a photo larger than a postage stamp. Keep in mind that a half-page color image in the magazine is about 15 megs in tif format. A 350K jpeg simply won’t work. Again, no sharpening or other manipulation, please. Image Resolution: For all images, the resolution is the standard of measure that matters. The ultimate resolution is the resolution of the image and the actual dimensions of the image. For high-quality publishing, images need to be 300 dpi (dots per inch, or pixels per inch) at the actual size they're going to be run in the publication. For example, if an image is going to be one-half a page horizontal, the dimensions are about 8" wide by 5" tall. The image, therefore, would need to be 8" by 5" at 300 dpi. If an image is 4000 dpi, it can be quite small and still have enough data for high-quality reproduction. If, however, an image is 72 dpi (standard for the internet), it can be quite large and still not have enough data for high-quality reproduction. This is somewhat translatable into file size. For color reproduction, we shoot for at least 40 megs in a RGB image, and 12 megs in a B&W image. Jpegs apply compression to an image to fit it into a smaller file size, but that comes at the expense of image quality. Our in-house scans are much larger than this, but for most reproduction those file sizes are adequate. For more information, contact: White River Productions 660-695-4433
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