I belong to a small non-profit club. I have taken over the monthly news letter, but there are some issues I need to clear up. The pictures that come to me are of all kinds. Most are taken with cell phones and sent to me via e-mail. On special occasions, our photographer shows up with a DSLR and takes some "ok" photos (he's not a real photographer, just snap happy) His pictures are sent to me as 300 dpi. The cell phone photos are sent as 72dpi. I have learned how to change the size and pixels of a photo in gimp to create small photos that will fit into our news letter. Some photos are as small as 2" x 6" so we can fit a lot into a small space.

I use the sharpen and desaturate filters to help photos appear clear on the computer screen. I even printed some of them out on an inkjet and was fairly satisfied with the appearance. However, some photos just seem to come out blurry or pixilated when sent to the publisher. How can I make sure that the images I send in will print clearly each time? How can I prepare these photos for our printer. All our news letters are printed in black and white. However, we are having a special "60th Anniversary" edition. This will be in full color and I want to make sure there will be no quality issues. If you have links to a really good tutorial, or if you can help me, I would really appreciate it.

There is no real DPI in a photo.... Per inch of what? In, Hubble photos cram mega-parsecs in a single pixel. A landscape photo is several furlongs per pixel. Macrophotography on a DSLR is 2000 pixels per inch of subject... DPI makes sense only in scans and in prints. And 72 dpi is a default value which is used when there is no value... (because it used to be roughly the definition of CRT displays).

The only thing that is really important in a picture is the size in pixels. If you want to print withdecent quality, you need at least 300pixels per inch, so that 2" by 6" picture should be at least 600*1800 pixels.

You should really ask the printing company for advice. A newsletter, so probably offset printing. Photographs will be 'half-toned' ie. made up of little dots. These tend to look fuzzy so the advice is over-sharpen before submitting. Nothing going to compensate for a tiny image scaled up and pixellated.

For the colour edition even more important to find the printers requirements. Often images are needed in CMYK colour-space and Gimp is strictly RGB. Still do your editing in Gimp and use free conversions such as https://www.rgb2cmyk.org/ Might not be needed if the printer is customer friendly and does the conversion for you.