Have I mentioned that I hate artwork?

The Triune corebooks (one for Players and one for Gamemasters) will be released both as a PDF and a print-on-demand softcover. Guess what? Those formats have different requirements for artwork. Hooray! More complications thanks to images!

See, images come in a variety of formats as well as resolutions. The formats are no big deal, but the resolutions are vital and they’re expressed either as dots per inch (dpi) or pixels per inch (ppi). They’re not the same thing but, as far as resolution goes, it is. (In other words, Photoshop junkies shouldn’t email me with lengthy explanations of the differences between the two. Thank you.)

Images for the web can be set to 72 ppi. However, take that image and print it in a book, and what do you get? One crappy, unprofessional looking image, that’s what. Images for books need to be 300 ppi.

Hey, no problemo! This is the digital age, baby! I’ll just crank it up to 300 ppi in some software thingy and it’s done! Not really. Resolution is the clarity of the image, but it’s also a representation of how much data is in the image, and that’s fixed, immobile, immutable, etc. In other words, you can increase the ppi with Photoshop but the image will still look bad when printed.

Which is a pain because I purchased some 72 ppi images from stock photo sights. Stupid me. Now I have to repurchase them at 300 ppi, which costs more.

Oh, artwork–how I loathe thee.