How big do my digital photos need to be, especially for a cover shot?
Photos are set at 300 pixels per inch for printing in the News. That means a shot that prints two columns wide (about 5 inches) needs to be about 1500 pixels long, and for one column, 700 pixels wide. A cover shot is usually 9.5 to 10 inches long, so I need a 3000-pixel-long image, at least a 6 mp. However, I can cheat a little and get good covers with 5 mp images, around 2500 pixels long. The main thing is, I can always shrink a photo down with no loss in quality, but I can’t increase the print size of one that’s too small.
