Getting started

Your screen resolution (Edit/Preferences/Units & Rulers) must be set correctly in order to accurately view figure sizes. It depends on your setup. It should be 157 pixels/inch if viewing on your laptop and 103 pixels/inch for the office monitors (if you have the double ones), but test this any time you install a new version of Photoshop.  Print out a figure and compare it to your screen after clicking View/Actual Size in Photoshop.

Set picas as the default unit of measure in Photoshop by going to Edit→Preferences→Units & Rulers and choosing pica as your unit of measure.

When you open a figure in Photoshop and the embedded profile does not match your working space, you will get a dialogue box asking you to choose between using the embedded profile, converting to the working space, or discarding the embedded profile. Your working space should be set correctly for figures, so this shouldn’t come up very often. Therefore, you should always use the embedded profile (Dot Gain 20% for LW and GS images and Adobe RGB (1998) for RGB figures), which should be the default choice in the dialogue box. Never discard the embedded profile.

When resizing, always be sure that “Resample Image” is not checked. This will ensure that Photoshop does not redraw pixel information—you will (and should) see the resolution change in relation to the size.

Size

Article thumbnails

Thumbnail (_thumb.gif) dimensions must always be set to 80 ✕ 80 pixels (6.67 picas) at 72 dpi. 

Pages are 42 ✕ 57 picas (width and length of page, respectively).

Research articles

There are two columns at 20.5 picas each, with a 1-pica space between them. 

Figure width Legend

0–20.5 picas       20.5 picas (one column)

20.5–28 picas Side legend

28–42 picas 42 picas (two columns)

57 picas Broadside legend (rare)

Front matter articles

In three-column layouts (see this document for the list of article types), each column is 13 picas wide.

Headshots can be jpegs or tifs. The size of the image in the online article depends on the pixel size. The picas still determine the size in the PDF though, so headshots may need to be resampled to achieve the right combination. This one, for example, is 325 x 325 pixels. If there are two headshots, they should be placed side by side in one file. See the Pre-sized Images page for further details.

Thumbnails: For articles that only contain headshots and no other images, the thumbnail should be the headshot. If there is more than headshot and the faces would be too small, you can use the related article's thumbnail or the journal logo. For JGP's Research News, the thumbnail should be created from the scientific image, not from the headshot(s).

JEM: The JEM logo must be added to the bottom of front matter figures, with the exception of headshots and other photos such as group lab photos. These article types are Reviews, Perspectives, Insights, Viewpoints, Found in Translation, and People & Ideas.

Figures that are too large will cause the article to fail. The maximum pixel dimensions allowed are a width of ~6,400 and height of ~7,685. Note that this is different than the dpi - the dpi could be 300 but the pixels could still be too high. The dpi of a figure shouldn't be over 1,200. There is no official article package limit for Nimble, but packages over 500 MB caused Nimble to stall at every step in the workflow.