Hi Richard, << Can I ask a quick supplementary? >>
Of course. << The jpgs are at the moment much bigger than I need: I'll have to scale them to about 40%. Should I process the jpgs into monochrome tiffs? Or would the conversion cost me definition? >> By all means, process the files. If possible, do this yourself or have someone with a good photographic eye do it. This ensures that you get the image that you want. If you don't convert them, then someone (or worse, some machine) at the printers will. This can sometimes result in a final product different than you had envisioned. Black and white is a completely different medium than color and it usually takes a little bit of tweaking to make sure that you get the images to your satisfaction. For example, most black and white photos should have a bit more contrast and a slightly higher adjusted exposure than the equivalent color photograph. This helps to bring out relevant details that might otherwise not be visible. (Keep in mind that I tend to be extremely fussy about images and figures.) The conversion shouldn't really cost you any definition, since you're only converting from color to black and white. Loss of "definition" seems to happen when changing the physical dimensions of the image. The conversion can be done in the photo program of your choice, but using Photoshop or Gimp will give you a tremendous amount of fine control over the image appearance. Re: JPEG to Tiff conversion. If your source images are already JPEG, then you shouldn't you don't really gain anything by saving it to TIFF (though I would anyway). If you save back to JPEG, make sure that the "quality" bar is set to 100%, or it will further compress the image and you will lose additional data. Also, when you "scale the images", make sure that they aren't down sampled (some image editing programs don't distinguish between the pixel dimensions and the physical dimensions). You want the pixel dimensions to remain the same, regardless of the physical dimensions. Most printing presses require images that are at least 300 dpi, though bigger is *always* better. It's a completely different mindset than when creating something for online distribution. Thus, I would avoid Photoshop's "Save for Web and Devices" feature or anything any-way similar. The entire purpose of "Save for Web and Devices" and co. is to down sample, not scale. One final thought: as long as the source images are of sufficient size, I would stick to scaling inside of LyX itself. There is a dialog box that will let you specify the physical dimensions without messing with the source image. Hope this is of some help. If you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to let me know. Cheers, Rob
