3) Generating High Quality Publication Figures

Methodology

Works for all images in MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

1) Copy the image to MS Word. If it is an Excel figure, you can leave it there, unless it does not fit an A4 page (then you move it to MS Word)

2) Convert the document to PDF (using the print option) with standard settings (600 dpi), and make sure the correct page size is selected (usually A4 works). Also, go to layout and click on advance, make sure the dpi setting there matches with that of the pdf pdi setting (in this case, 600dpi). And if you want to print in greyscale, change the colour to black. For excel figures that do not fit A4, you can try page sizes larger than A4 and then later crop the empty spaces.

3) Crop the document to the required size. Go to document menu --> crop --> remove white spaces. If you have a page number at the bottom, make sure you remove it first before you select "remove white pages" option.

4) Export to TIFF. File--> Export-->Image-->TIFF-->Set setting to 600dpi and the relevant colour options --> Save. When prompted, also save the cropped PDF.

5)You are done, you now have your 600dpi image file, which you can insert to a MS Word document to send to the journal.

Dealing with Graffle images

1) Export the image to Photoshop format at 600dpi.

2) Open the image in Photoshop and save it as TIFF@600dpi


OLD METHOD

1) Copy and paste the MS Excel/Powerpoint figure to MS Word (if copying from Excel, paste as enhanced metafile).

2) Adjust the image to fit the desired size. Take note of the size of the final image.

3) Convert the MS Word document to PDF with 600 dpi setting

4) Open the PDF file, set zoom to 100% and then select the image to be converted to TIFF (Tools --> Select & Zoom --> Snapshot Tool). Selecting zoom to 100% is very important because you want to capture the maximum quality of the image at its original size. This step is not so critical for figures exported from the Graffle program (For Mac Only) because when the image is exported, it is already exported to 100% magnification.

5) Copy and paste the image from PDF to Photoshop. File--> New --> don't change any settings yet in the window that pops up, except for the part whether you want the image to be greyscale, RGB or CMYK.

6) To set the image to the desired resolution (for example, 600dpi)using Photoshop: Image --> Image Size - -> Set the resolution to 600dpi. Ensure that you have selected the dpi and not the dpcm option.

7) To set the image to the original size in the MS Word document (see point 2) using Photoshop: Image--> Image Size --> In the "Document Size" section, set the width and the height to the original size of the image in MS Word before it was converted to PDF (see point 2).

8) Save the image as TIFF with LZW compression.

9) As a backup also save the photoshop file in case you want to make changes in the future.

10) Insert the saved TIFF image to a MS Word document and compare its quality with the original image. Don't trust what you see on screen. It is always good to print out the image to check how it looks on paper. Even though, sometimes it is difficult to beat the original image that you generated from MS Word, Excel or Powerpoint, the TIFF images generated are usually of reasonable high quality and file size for publication purposes. Most of the quality is lost when compressing the image to smaller size and we have no choice but to do that to avoid clogging up the disk space on the journal's server.