An old topic that still puzzles to a degree....


My brother-in-law has just had his first book published and needs a picture of himself for the back cover sleeve, seems easy enough. He took a few shots with his P&S Canon digital only to find they were rejected as the size was too small. The publishers reset the original dpi to 300 but the image apparently was then the size of a postage stamp ? { not sure what the original dpi off camera was though }

Seems the publishers want maximum file size and a minimum 300dpi, fair enough but that does seem to be an overkill for a tiny portrait picture on the back of a paper back crime thriller ?

Being a Canon I'm not sure what's what on this camera, but it's 10mp and straight off camera surely the dpi would be at least 200dpi and surely good enough for a tiny portrait for a book cover He has only the basic editing program that came with the camera.

Talking to my B-I-L I advised him to set his camera to maximun jpeg quality, but he says he cant find anything relevant to that in book or camera ??? I then asked if he has set the picture size to large and it seems maybe he had it set to small and maybe that is the reason the publishers rejected the images, at small the images only had pixel dimensions of about 640 x 430 or something, that sounds about right I think. OK, so now he says he has set it to large and it says on camera the pixel dimensions is something in the order of 3460x 2130 { or something like that } but not sure of the dpi. When he now downloads the images to his PC they still say pixel dimensions of 640x 430 ??? ....unless he didn't set it properly on camera.

So I guess this is my question......if he sets his 10mp Canon to large picture surely the dpi and pixel dimension file size straight off camera, no editing or resizing is more than enough for a small book back cover portrait shot ?...and why in the world would the publishers request minimum of 300dpi, and I wonder what dpi the images would be straight off camera anyway.

Maybe I should get him to send the images to me and see what I can work out.