When designing eye-catching high quality magazines, using professional images is often the make or break  of the overall finished product.

When you see a magazine with blurry or fuzzy images, it throws the whole design out of focus. More annoyingly, it is completely avoidable. Not only does it make the designer and publisher look like amateurs, but with custom magazines, it also reflects poorly on the brand.

The minimum resolution for commercial offset printing is 300dpi in JPG format. If you plan to take the photos yourself and run them in your magazine, then you will need the right equipment and your camera must be set to the highest quality setting. Mobile phone photos are not professional and do not print well, no matter how much you love your new glitzy mobile.

Consider all aspects such as lighting and composition. The tie with food stains down the front needs to go, the desk piled high with clutter and papers looks messy and needs to be cleared, the dead office plant behind the model (and which now looks like its growing out of the top their head) needs to be moved.  Strong images will give your publication credibility and professionalism. Our design team always retouches supplied imagery to enhance the colours and fix any little imperfections, but the better the image is to start with the more potential it has for looking great in print.

Top Tips for Taking a Good Photo:

• Equipment – Use a digital camera, not a mobile phone or a webcam.
• Settings – Make sure you are shooting at the highest setting available.
• Lighting – Do not shoot into the sun, if you are in a room turn all the lights on, open the blinds and try and avoid using the flash.
• Composition – Remove clutter and by-standers, make sure the set-up area is clean and professional.
• People – Ask people to smile or be normal and relaxed, no strange facial expressions, no eating or drinking. Make sure the people in the image look professional, are wearing professional clothes, clean and are well groomed.
• Image – Think of the image you are trying to project with this photo and make sure it works with your magazine. If the magazine is for professional business readers avoid photos of people in personal unprofessional settings such as at private parties or in nightclubs.
• File – Save the image as a JPG and do not try and Photoshop the image, leave the retouching to us, the professionals.

If all else fails, there are many great stock image resources for obtaining high resolution photos, and we will often use our image library to source professional imagery for you. We have more then 10 million so there are always other options.