Scanning Specifications

• NO JPEGs. PNG is the preferred format; TIFF is acceptable as long as you are certain you do not use JPEG compression inside the TIFF format. GIF is only acceptable as a last resort, and ONLY for grayscale images with a full 256-shade grayscale palette.

• 300 dpi minimum. In fact, I scan at 600 dpi, do basic cleanup and correction, then scale down to 300 dpi to minimize any flaws in the scan.

• Grayscale or Full Color. I don't want 1-bit scans. Even black & white images (see the 1993 Bearhunt Calendar for good examples) should be scanned in grayscale. If an image is grayscale, please scan it as such, NOT as color! Only scan an image as color if it really IS color.

• Full Dynamic Range. Most decent image software will show you a histogram of the distribution of light to dark in a given image - Photoshop calls this "Levels." Much of Mr. Ward's work is inked line art; for a piece like that, there should be strong peaks at the black and white extremes, and not so much in between. For a real grayscale or colored piece, the distribution will be much more even - but in any case, the histrogram should NOT be all bunched up at one end or the other of the scale. If it is - your scanner is not calibrated properly.

• Not Overprocessed. The best thing you can do is to simply scan the image with a properly calibrated scanner and send it to me. Let me handle any post-processing, so I can make sure scans by contributors match the ones I do as closely as possible.

Thanks for your interest,