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Pictures

Choosing, cropping and placing pictures, and getting them ready for print and the screen.

Crop

To cut away the edges of a picture so that only part of it is printed. A crop decides what a picture is about as much as how it fits its space.

4 : 5 portrait · keeps 26%

Drag the frame to move it and its corner to resize it (or use the arrow keys, with Shift to resize). Everything outside the frame is left off the page.

NotResize: which makes the whole picture bigger or smaller and keeps everything in it.

SayFor the Lowtide contents page, crop the harbour photo tight on the lighthouse and lose the boat.

Aspect ratio

Also: proportions

The shape of a picture: its width compared with its height, written as 3:2 or 4:5. Two pictures with different ratios can’t fill the same frame unless one is cropped.

3:2

The shape most cameras take. Printed whole, a photograph keeps all of what the photographer framed.

NotSize: how big the picture is printed. A 3:2 picture can be 3 cm or 30 cm wide.

SayMake every photo in the Bread on Sundays index 1:1, so the loaves sit in neat rows of four.

Focal point

Also: point of interest

The part of a picture the eye goes to first, and the thing the picture is about: a face, a loaf on a board, the lighthouse. Crops and text laid over the picture should leave it alone.

focal point

A tall frame cut from the middle of a wide photo: sea and sky, and the lighthouse is gone.

NotCentre: the middle of the frame. Photographers rarely put the subject there, so cropping from the middle often loses it.

SayKeep the lighthouse in every crop of the Lowtide cover photo, including the narrow one for the contents page.

Inset

Also: picture-in-picture, inset map

A small picture placed inside a larger one, with its own border: a close-up of a detail, or on a map, a small map that shows where the area is.

The inset is a small map of the whole city, set inside the walk map with its own border. The box on it shows where the walk is.

NotMontage: several pictures merged into one image, with no borders between them.

SayOn every walk map in Lisbon on Foot, add an inset of the whole city in the top corner, with a box where the walk is.

Cut-out

Also: deep-etch, silhouette

A picture with its background removed, so the object stands on the page itself. The outline the background is cut along is called a clipping path.

Bread on Sundays

Country loaf

Cut out, the loaf loses its board and wall and sits on the page itself. The page’s white becomes its background.

NotVignette: a picture whose edges fade softly into the page instead of ending at a cut line.

SayUse cut-outs of the loaves on the Bread on Sundays index pages, all on white and shot at the same scale.

Text wrap

Also: runaround, wraparound

Text that flows round a picture instead of stopping above it and starting again below. It can follow the picture’s rectangular frame or the outline of a cut-out.

Every Sunday my grandmother baked one loaf, round and heavy, cut three times across the top so it could open in the oven. She never weighed anything. She knew the dough was ready by the way it sprang back under her thumb, and the loaf was done when its base sounded hollow as she knocked on it.

The amounts in this book are exact because mine have to be. Hers never were, and her bread was better.

The text follows the outline of the cut-out, so lines reach in above and below the loaf.

NotFloat: the web word for a picture that text flows around. Layout software calls the setting text wrap.

SayRun the introduction around the outline of the loaf, with 3 mm between the words and the bread.

Credit line

Also: picture credit, photo credit

The small line naming who made a picture or who owns it. It sits beside the picture or, in many books, on a list of credits at the back. A picture’s licence often says which.

Fig. 4.1 The light at Holm Point at dawn, from this issue’s cover story.Photo: Ade Okafor for Lowtide
Photo: Ade Okafor for Lowtide

Small, so it doesn’t compete with the caption, but always there: a photo’s licence often says how it must be credited.

NotCaption: which tells the reader about the picture. The credit only says whose it is.

SayRun each photo’s credit up its right-hand edge in the Lowtide features, and list the agency pictures on the contributors page.

Alt text

Also: alternative text, image description

A short written description stored with a picture in an ebook or web page, read aloud by a screen reader to someone who can’t see it. The printed book doesn’t need it; its digital edition does.

Screen reader

Image. A white lighthouse with two dark bands on a green headland above the sea. A small fishing boat sails on the left.

The picture looks the same either way. What changes is what a reader who can’t see it hears from a screen reader in the digital edition.

NotCaption: which everyone sees, and says what the picture shows or why it matters. Alt text says what the picture looks like, for someone who can’t look.

SayWrite alt text for every photo in the Lowtide digital edition, saying what matters to the story, not just what is in the frame.

Raster and vector

Also: bitmap (raster)

A raster picture is a grid of coloured squares (pixels), like a photograph. A vector picture is stored as outlines and fills, like a logo, a map or a diagram, and prints sharp at any size.

vector · an outline
raster · 40 × 40 pixels
4×

At its own size the two look the same. Zoom in: the vector is redrawn from its outline at every size; the raster only has its pixels, which grow into squares.

NotFile type: JPEG and PNG files are always raster; SVG and EPS hold vectors; a PDF can hold either. Saving a raster as a PDF doesn’t make it a vector.

SaySend the Lisbon on Foot walk maps as vector files, SVG or PDF, not screenshots, so the street names stay sharp.

Resolution

Also: ppi, pixels per inch

How many pixels a picture has for each inch of its printed size, in pixels per inch (ppi). Print needs about 300 ppi at the size it is printed, so a picture can be fine small and too coarse large.

printed 6 cm wide
1 cm, enlarged

Each square is one pixel. Printed 6 cm wide at 72 ppi, the picture has 170 pixels across: the steps show at arm’s length.

Notdpi: dots per inch, how many ink dots a printer lays down. People often say dpi when they mean ppi; for a picture file, ppi is the right word.

SayCheck that every photo in Bread on Sundays is at least 300 ppi at the size it’s printed. Flag any that aren’t; don’t enlarge them.

Halftone

Also: halftone screen

The pattern of tiny dots a press uses to print a photograph. A press can only print solid ink or none, so darker tones are bigger dots and lighter tones are smaller ones.

1×

Printing presses can’t print grey: a dot of ink is there or it isn’t. Magnify the picture and its greys turn out to be black dots of different sizes.

NotPixels: the squares a digital picture is made of. The halftone is made from the pixels when the picture goes to press.

SayThis 1890s race photo for A Short History of the Bicycle was scanned from an old magazine and its halftone dots show: find a better print, or descreen it.

Duotone

A black-and-white photograph printed in two inks, usually black and one colour. It gives old or plain photos depth and a colour that belongs to the publication.

black blue

The same black-and-white photo. In two inks the blue fills the middle tones and black holds the shadows, so it reads deeper and colder.

NotTint: one ink printed at part strength, such as 30% blue. A duotone uses two inks together.

SayMake the archive photos in this issue of Lowtide duotones in black and the magazine’s blue, so they sit apart from the colour pictures.

Next8Colour and print