Creating high-quality publication figures

Different researchers have different ways of preparing their figures for publication purposes. I used to use Adobe Photoshop for this purpose. However, I almost always used to lose some quality when transferring the figure from the MS Word or Power point to Photoshop. With the recent advancement in the ability of software like Adobe Acrobat 8 in handling images, I have identified a method that produces high-quality publication images and is also simple to perform. See below for the details:

All images in general

This method works for all images in MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint using Adobe Acrobat 8. I am not sure if this method works for older versions of Acrobat or other programs with Acrobat like functionality

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


Do you know of a method that is better or simpler? Please share