Hi! I am writing my first paper (have been writing for ages now) but finally am ready to submit it. The journal we have chosen to submit the article requires images as tiff images of 300 dpi. I tried using paint to magnify and save the excel chart as tiff, but the resolution was too poor...only 96 dpi. I was advised to use powerpoint, which increased the resolution to max 150 dpi. Then someone else suggested photoshop, which was great in increasing resolution, however when i uploaded the images, they all have a black background in pdf. I checked by inserting the pics in word, and they appear allright, but are ark in paint. Can ayone please tell me how to convert excel charts or powerpoint drawn images to tiff files of 300 dpi? I am really desperate...:-(

Not sure about this one, but have you contacted the journal / your IT department for advice?

if the original is really small in physical size and low in resolution, there is not much you can do. When you increase the resolution, the physical size of the image will get smaller.. If you can tell me the details of the original (actual dimensions and original resolution) I can tell you the options. I can also help you with creating a 300 dpi version if the original allows.

ah, and you can convert them to jpegs first from excel or powerpoint from "export" option.

Funny you should mention that as I was grappling with the same problem over the weekend. Fortunately, I've solved it. Excel cannot export as a TIF. Indeed, Powerpoint can export as a TIF but only at 150 dpi. So what you need is a bit of add-on software which acts as a virtual printer (i.e. appears as a printer in your list but doesn't actually print, it instead saves it as an image. There are various paid-for versions out there, but after considerable faff on Sunday I managed to find a free add-on. It's called PDFCreator and yes, it's primary purpose is to create PDFs from whatever you choose to "print". However, it has options to save as other things - one being TIFF. When you send your document to "print", you select the PDFCreator printer, it opens the PDFCreator software and if you choose the Options button and click the "Formats" tab, you'll be able to choose TIFF as you're output and select the resolution you want.

One piece of advice when you use it. For some reason, if you choose the resolution in the TIFF screen it doesn't save it but instead reverts back to 150 dpi before it processes the image. Instead, if you choose the "Raw" format at the bottom of the list of Format options, set that to 300 dpi, when you click back to the TiFF format that too will have changed to 300 dpi. As long as you choose Save, these settings will be saved.

You'll have to play with it a few times so you get the hang of how it works, but it works an absolute treat for creating hi-res TIFFs and has thus far worked on lots of different software. In case you're wondering where I found out, I was trawling various forums on how to solve this problem and this was suggested by one of the Microsoft developers as a solution. The link is:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

thank you, guys...I will try your suggestions, Sylvester and let you know what happens. I did try our IT services, who suggested that i copy them onto powerpoint and save it as tiff files from there...i am having another go with them today, i have an appointment in the afternoon...and 404...the original charts are in excel, so i can increase their physical dimensions, right? just by enlarging them? anyways, currently, they are 18.45 cm x 9.18 cm (640 X 480 resolution) and when converted into tiff, 697 x 347 (96 dpi)

I've been struggling with this for the past few hours, and the solution above didn't fully work for me, so this is just to share my experience of how I adapted it.

Using PDF Creator did give me a 300dpi image, which was great. The downside was that when I printed a chart from excel with it, the dimensions were all distorted (it was stretched to fit on an A4 page). I solved that by exporting my image to Powerpoint first (I couldn't find another solution), but then ran into another problem (which seems to come up however you create a document with PDF Creator, that my image is now sitting in the middle of a sheet of (virtual) paper and needs cropping.

After more cursing, I managed to solve that by downloading GIMP (open source image editing software) and cropping the image - it seems to still be 300dpi, so fingers crossed, the journal will accept it.

What a rigmarole!

======= Date Modified 30 Sep 2010 16:46:43 =======
============= Edited by a Moderator =============
*edited by mods- spam*