How to Prepare Photos for Newsprint
Printing photos on your home inkjet or color laser printer is a lot different than printing them in a newspaper on newsprint. There are differences in how you set up your digital images for color, tone and contrast and differences in the medium to which you plan to print. Newsprint is one of the cheapest forms of printing paper, which is not a problem for newspapers because most people throw their newspapers out the next day. However, this does present a problem for image quality.
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Instructions
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Start your photo-editing software and select a digital image to work on or scan a print or negative into the computer. Standard home photo-editing software often will not work for newspapers and newsprint because it usually won't offer you the color mode choice of cyan, magenta, yellow and black, or CMYK. The “K” represents black and the black plate is the base plate, the one the other three are lined up with. Standard home photo-editing software may have several options such as RGB (red, green, blue) or Indexed Color, but rarely CMYK. You need a professional-level software package to prepare images for newsprint.
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Make a copy of the image you want to work with by going to the “File” menu and choosing “Save As.” Then choose a new name for the image. A lot of what you will be doing will be irreversible, so do not touch the original image--work on the copy.
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Resize your digital to the resolution required for the newsprint final copy. For most newspapers, this is between 180 and 200 dots per inch. Even if the destination is 180 dpi, use 200 because it will give a better image in the imprecise world of newsprint printing. To set the resolution, go to the “Image” menu and then “Image Size.” Set the width and height according to what you need, then type “200” in the box next to “Resolution.” If you are preparing the image for a newspaper, ask the photo editor what resolution your image should be. Newer presses may have higher resolution, so it might be more than 200 dpi.
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Tone your digital image while it still is in the standard RGB mode. This is important because toning in CMYK may throw off the final color. Go to the “Image” menu, select “Adjustments” and then “Levels.” Many newspapers have set levels you must follow, so get the numbers of their final output to proceed. If there is no standard, use the right eyedropper to find the whitest area of the image and click, then use the left eyedropper to find the darkest area and click. This should give you a good tonal balance. Then go to the “Filters” menu and select “Sharpen,” then “Unsharp Mask.” Again, the newspaper may have set numbers for this, but if it does not, try approximately 150 percent.
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Go to the “Image” menu and then “Mode” to select CMYK after you have the photo toned and sized the way you want it. Newspaper photo editors generally want the image saved in either TIFF format or Photoshop DCS 1 or DCS 2 format, but it is best to ask first. Some may even want it in a portable document format or PDF.
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Tips & Warnings
No matter how bright the image appears on your screen, it will appear darker on newsprint. It's a good idea to lighten an image a bit more than you normally would. After you have toned the image, go to “Image,” then “Adjustments,” then “Shadows/Highlights” and use the default setting.
References
- Photo Credit Tom Ackerman/Stockbyte/Getty Images
